


batshit genius scientist prophet goddess

by longtime_lurker



Category: The Social Network (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Alternate Universe - Canon, Bisexual Female Character, F/F, Lesbian Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-14
Updated: 2013-11-14
Packaged: 2018-01-01 11:43:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 22,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1044424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/longtime_lurker/pseuds/longtime_lurker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>baby's first ladyslash! canon AU with double gender/sex-swap, aka girl!Mark/girl!Eduardo.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I screwed around a bit with the canon timeline and also assumed that Harvard already had special-by-request mixed-gender rooming arrangements back in '03, as they do nowadays. I have no idea if that is actually the case! ~handwaves anyway for plot purposes~
> 
> warning for brief cheating, some homophobia, and pervasive misogyny, internalized and otherwise. this Mark, especially, isn't any less fucked-up about women just because I made her a woman too. 
> 
> title from A Softer World; epigraphs from Michael Cunningham, Richard Siken and Ani DiFranco. originally posted to LiveJournal in June 2011.

 

  
_She wants to have produced something marvelous; something that would be marvelous even to those who do not love her._

 

 

 

> **Mark**
> 
> Mark Zuckerberg first started going by that name in sixth grade after having spent a half-hour or so on her first tech forum. A quick-to-learn kid in general, she learned as quickly as she'd ever learned anything that practically the worst liability you could have in that kind of a space was a userhandle that identified you as female.
> 
> "It’s like an automatic Go Directly To Not Being Taken Seriously card," she explains to the depressingly gorgeous girl in the next uncomfortable lecture-hall seat over. "So I just chopped it off to Mark and started going by that instead, on the boards, and -" She shrugs. "I spent so much time online, eventually I just got used to it," and the girl nods, regards her for a moment with big, expressive dark eyes.
> 
> Five minutes ago Depressingly Gorgeous had come into Mark's first stats class of the semester, glanced around, hesitated for a second and then sat down next to Mark with a friendly smile. A moment later the prof started reading off the list of names registered for the course, checking it against who had actually bothered to show up. He'd done it in reverse alphabetical order, just to be contrarian or clever or whatever, so that the very first one was "Zuckerberg, Marcia?"
> 
> "It's Mark," Mark corrected him.
> 
> He'd sort of adjusted his glasses at her, but went ahead and wrote down the change anyway, probably assuming – she doesn't know what, nor does she care, really; Mark normally doesn't bother to explain, just lets people think what they're going to think.
> 
> As soon as the prof's attention moved on, though, this girl leaned over. By then Mark had managed to place her as one of the zillion people she met last week while rushing Delta Gamma, and fully planned to just nod stiffly at her and then ignore her for the rest of the semester.
> 
> But when Depressingly Gorgeous said, "I _thought_ I recognized you from the Delta rush. So...you go by Mark?" her face was so warm and open that Mark found herself - finds herself now - in the position of actually volunteering personal information pretty much unprompted for once while simultaneously wracking her brain to try and remember the girl's name.
> 
> Mark sucks with names, especially weird ones, and she's pretty sure this was a weird one. All she can remember is that she's a sophomore from "Brazil by way of Miami" - which would account for her soft, unplaceable accent - and is also (it bears repeating) depressingly gorgeous. All lean clean lines, a touch of olive to her complexion - it looks intrinsic, natural, not like those awful orange-ified chicks Mark sees around B.U. – full mouth, sweet eyes fringed with million-mile lashes. Her thick hair is cut in a face-framing bob and styled so strictly into place that Mark has the momentary urge to touch it, put her fingers in it just to see if she could even manage to dislodge a strand. She's wearing a tailored suit with matching blazer and pencil skirt, tall sharp heels made for clicking authoritatively through the lobbies of banks and down the corridors of office buildings, an understated flash of jewelry at her ears and another on the ring finger of her left hand.
> 
> Mark chews on her ballpoint pen, watches Depressingly Gorgeous uncross her long legs, recross them delicately at the ankle, and she feels abruptly, unpleasantly aware of the fact that she herself is the furthest thing from statuesque and polished: short and scrawny in the unfashionable pale-and-malnourished way of geek types who don't spend enough time outdoors, hair kept cropped in a wash-and-go pixie mop of tight curls, posture perma-shot from slouching and hunching over keyboards, tits and hips invisible inside her oversize hoodie.
> 
> She thinks to herself, _Whatever though, I'm almost definitely more intelligent than she is;_ and if she maybe deep down doesn't ever stop thinking that, well, no one else has to know.

 

 

**Eduarda**

"Chris and Dustin haven't gotten back yet?" Eduarda calls over the top of the horrifically heavy cardboard box that she's attempting to heft through the door of the Kirkland triple.

"Fuck no," comes Mark's smug voice from one of the bedrooms, and Eduarda looks through the open door to see her tossing her duffel onto the bed, marking her territory. "And I am hereby ganking the best room before they do."

Eduarda shifts the box in her aching arms, staggers a little further into the room. "I still can't believe OSL is letting you live with them."

"Yeah, well, they have to accommodate the request if someone makes it, it’s policy. Careful with that," and Mark's hands flutter towards the box Eduarda's carrying, "it's computer shit."

"I know," Eduarda says, lowering the box to the floor with the appropriate degree of gingerness: if you want to stay friends for long with a CS kid, you do not fuck around with their pet hardware. "They're _all_ computer shit."

"Not true," Mark says, slow-kicking another densely packed box in through the door with her shins, bare and unshaved below her cargo shorts. "This one is Xbox shit. No, all I had to do," with one of her characteristic topic jumps, "was go in and tell them I 'didn’t feel comfortable' with a female roommate. Quote unquote."

"Did they want, like, a reason?" Eduarda wipes her hair back from her face. It's August in Cambridge, muggy as fuck, and moving is sweaty work. They had to lug all of Mark's stuff up the stairs, and by now Mark's white wifebeater is so soaked with sweat that it's gone translucent in patches, showing the definitely-not-white sports bra underneath. Eduarda never fails to be kind of delighted at exactly how little fashion sense Mark possesses.

"They might've, but they didn't ask for one. I'm sure they just assumed." Mark snickers, digging a boxcutter out of one cargo pocket and going for a box that is marked, inexplicably, MZUCK’S BABY. "Which, the gay thing's not even why, but whatever."

"Oh?" Eduarda drags in the last box from the hallway and then flops down into a stray computer chair, plucking at her camisole where it's sticking sweatily to her breastbone. MZUCK’S BABY appears to contain...oh, Mark's favorite desktop computer, of course. Right. Eduarda leans back, watches the flex of Mark’s skinny biceps as she lifts the monitor and CPU gently out of their nest of packing peanuts.

"Nope." Mark sets her teeth into her lip, grunting softly as she hoists the hardware up onto the computer desk, like an absolute stereotype of an out-of-shape CS concentrator. "I don't care about changing in front of people or whatever, I just didn't want to room with a girl. I had to do that at boarding school and it was nothing but catty, bitchy drama. I'd much rather just be one of the guys than deal with _that_ crap again." She slants her eyes at Eduarda, adds with the slight grimace-twist that is the Zuckerberg smile: "Present company always excepted, of course."

Eduarda demurs halfheartedly as to the not-so-badness of an entire gender, and Mark says, "Whatever, like you can talk, you've got a _single,"_ in a you-lucky-me-jealous tone as she sets up and boots up. At the sound of the startup chime she visibly relaxes and settles in, slumping onto the couch as if now, with the requisite tech in working order, the triple really feels like home. She puts her feet up on the coffee table – unmindful of her grimy flip-flops, cheap summer things that look to be falling apart in real time – and pulls her phone out of another cargo pocket to check her voicemail.

Down the hallway Eduarda can hear somebody else moving in, WHRB blasting out through the door they've got propped open while they lug shit in and out. It's the same god damned Coldplay song that’s been all over the radio all summer.

"Dustin says he'll be in by five and we should get dinner together," Mark reports, pocketing her phone and digging out her laptop from her bookbag. "You wanna stay and watch a movie or something till then?" – Mark-speak for _thanks for helping me move in_. "I'm not going to even bother starting to unpack until it's cooled down some."

"Sure." Eduarda wheels her computer chair over to where they dumped the minifridge down, plugs it in, and sticks in the twelve-pack that she brought over to celebrate their return to campus. She's newly twenty-one - this is the first semester she's been of age – which is going to make her a total godsend to the 19- and 20-year-olds in the Kirkland triple this year, if the appreciative way Mark's looking at her right now is any indication.

She wheels back over towards the couch and slumps down there besides Mark, not too close because it's _so_ freaking hot, and Mark starts up the movie file on the laptop. They've both seen _A Beautiful Mind_ a billion times and don't need to pay much attention, can talk over it while they lounge around trying to cool down and waiting for the beer to reach, if not coldness exactly, at least an acceptable level of lukewarm. Eduarda snarks on the screenwriters' oversimplification-ridden attempts to water down Nash equilibria for the moviegoing public, and Mark sniggers just like she always does through the scene where Russell Crowe's character gets slapped after trying to proposition a girl in a bar. _I don't exactly know what I am required to say in order for you to have intercourse with me,_ she mouths smirkily along with the audio track, _but could we assume that I said all that? I mean, essentially we're talking about fluid exchange -_

They've thrown all of the dorm's windows open as wide as they can go, and if they don't move too much (like at all) and just let the breeze wash over them, it's totally tolerable. Eduarda kicks off her flats and stretches out her legs, half watching the film, half listening as Mark spends the "slow parts" – i.e. the romantic ones, which is typical Mark, and Eduarda's perversely reassured to see that she hasn't changed any over the summer - biting the hand that feeds her by ripping apart the OSL policy that's allowing her to room with Chris and Dustin in the first place.

"It basically operates on the assumption that if you're gay that must mean you have a hard-on for every single person of your preferred gender, _ever,_ " she says, and she looks at Eduarda and laughs. "Which I don't, you know."

The moving air from the window is stirring her curls and below them her eyes are fixed on Eduarda in kind of a weird, intense way, and Eduarda's heart does an awkward stutter thing, because she's pretty sure Mark is trying to hint that _it doesn't, for example, mean that I want to bone YOU._ And that's – she doesn't get why Mark would even feel like she had to point that out, because it's not like that with them, it never has been. Eduarda's been there to see Mark get _that_ way about girls, seen it plenty, the poorly concealed way she desires and despises them in equal measure, but that’s not how _they_ are. They're friends.

"Right, no," Eduarda says, and watches Mark lick a rolling bead of sweat from her upper lip. "Of course not" - at which point Dustin comes tumbling into the dorm, doing an extremely loud and off-key rendition of 'The Boys Are Back In Town' while spilling the contents of his cardboard box absolutely everywhere, and the awkward moment's safely behind them.

 

**Mark**

_Erica Albright is a bitch,_ she types with furious, precise strokes into the LiveJournal entry box. _Let's face it, ok: people who say they want someone who speaks her mind and doesn't play games are_ full of it. _That isn't really what they want, guys or girls. They can't HANDLE real honesty._

Somewhere at the back of her brain Mark is perfectly aware that she's saying more than she would if she were sober, but the rest of her, the hurt drunken resentful part, doesn't care and keeps ranting about Erica for another four paragraphs of mostly vitriol. _The truth is she has a nice face -_

She's too wrapped up in her beer and bitching to even notice the guys when they come in, at least until Dustin leans his head through her open doorway and makes some tasteless crack about the fishy stink in here – so she left a dirty tuna can or two on the desk, big deal - as it putatively relates to the fact that Mark possesses a vagina and doesn’t shower as often as she could. Mark takes the dart out of her mouth and makes to aim it right into Dustin's eyeball; he dives onto her bed, begging for mercy through his giggles, and Mark cracks a grin despite herself. If Warda were here, she'd probably be squawking indignantly about how Mark ought to stand up for the respect she deserves or whatever – but Mark's spent enough years in dude-heavy spaces, messageboards and CS labs, to know that when your guy friends give you shit you're supposed to just roll with it and give them shit right back.

"You wish you knew what pussy even smells like," she tells Dustin accordingly, and he makes a _touché, good sir_ face and gives her the finger. Dustin rooms with a gay chick and a gay dude, and it's a sore point with him that they both get laid more than he does, despite how "statistically speaking, that totally shouldn't even be the case! My potential partner pool is like nine times larger than either of yours!"

She turns back to her monitor. _Whatever,_ she continues. _I'm so fucking over investing effort into any of that right now. I've got two working hands and a reliable vibrator – which, unlike Erica, I can use without even having to leave the computer – and also, better, a shiny new project..._ and she tabs over to the text editor in which she's writing Facemash.

"Whazzat?" Dustin says from her bed, head perking up at the screenful of code, and Mark lets him come hang over her shoulder to take a look, although when he reaches for the mouse she automatically bats his hand away. "Huh," he says, eyes tracking down and down as she scrolls through the window, "mm hm," processing the code in chunks, and then, "uh _huh."_

Mark crosses her arms over her chest. "What?"

Dustin's laughing, kind of. "And you're – really? – gonna send this shit out to the whole -"

Mark snorts, talking over him. "Please. Here, look at –" She fumbles into one of the crooked stacks of papers on her desk, comes up with a battered copy of a glossy women's magazine that Warda left here months ago (no, Mark has not cleaned in here since) and flips it open to a random page: an article rating celebrities on their fashion sense, a lip-gloss ad opposite. "Like it's any different from - Look, people eat this shit up with a spoon, guys, girls, _everyone."_

"Okay, okay," and Dustin's holding up his hands, palms out. "But I bet you kept _your_ picture out of the running, right?"

"Of course." Mark looks blankly at him, because, duh. "Warda's, too."

Dustin looks at her funny – funnier than he's already been doing, even – for a second before he apparently shakes it off and turns back to the screen. "Anyway, so alright, what if you tweaked the layout like -"

 

**Eduarda**

So Eduarda kind of stalks her best friend's blog, a little, maybe, yeah. It's not for any kind of _weird_ reasons, and it's definitely not for the sake of Mark's deathless prose. It's just that Mark will tell the whole internet things that she wouldn't or couldn't ever spit out in person, and Eduarda wants to _know_ those things, so she keeps an eye on Mark's online rantings. They're like a supplementary resource to actually being friends with Mark in person.

Which is why she's hurrying up the Kirkland stairs at two in the morning (resigning herself already to being a shuffling zombie in her early class tomorrow) to check in with Mark, who – according to said blog, at any rate - got dumped tonight.

Eduarda met Erica once or twice, just enough to get the impression of a sweet earnest femme type who was active in Spectrum at B.U., who was probably, honestly, too nice for Mark - and who Mark has now summarily dismissed as a bitch with a padded bra, for God and all of cyberspace to see, because she's just classy like that. Eduarda sighs, rubbing at her forehead as she pauses for a second outside the triple. Mark can be kind of a – bitch or whatever herself, especially when she's been drinking. Vengeful, petty, prone to overreaction. Eduarda knows from experience.

She goes on into the room, and she can immediately tell that sure enough, Mark's still drunk - Eduarda knew to expect that much from her journal post – and still mad, too, that cold indrawn anger of hers that seriously can't be healthy. But there's something else in the air too, some kind of - excitement? Chris and Dustin are crowded around her computers, three pairs of eyes tracking the activity on two separate screens at once, and Mark's got her game face on: jaw set and lips thinned out, irises gone almost black where they're zeroed in on whatever-it-is on the screens.

It's her usual focused expression turned up to eleven, and it's kind of – scary, almost, which is stupid since Mark's such an unassuming-looking flip-flopped curly-haired hoodie-clad little bit of a thing, but there it is. It's something about how she looks so impossibly intent on whatever-it-is that if you happened to be in the way, she would steamroll right over you without even thinking twice.

"What's going on?"

Mark tells her.

It's a truly terrible idea, an awful hurtful idea, Eduarda can recognize that much. But the trouble is that like a lot of people here at Harvard she's drawn to talent, to competence, to people doing their thing and doing it well: so it's a little bit bewitching, honestly, watching Mark's fingers dance over the keys, creating something out of nothing. And when Mark asks for the Elo rating formula Eduarda caves in record time, Mark's face reflected back at her in the windowpane as the grease marker squeaks across the glass.

She sighs again, snags another beer from the minifridge and takes a long pull, as Mark hits Send and the Facemash link heads on out there into the ether, irretrievable as that stupid thing you said one time when you were young and drunk that ended up coming back to bite you right in the ass.

She watches Mark watch the traffic climb, right up until their misbegotten brainchild brings down the network and they all stare at each other with identical _ohshit_ grins. She watches, and she sees the way that Mark is practically vibrating with the primal glee of validation, the kind Mark pretends she doesn't care about but here it is, written all over her face: _I made this thing and people used it, they LIKED it._

Eduarda could, theoretically, try and stop her and ask: _Yeah, but this thing you made, is it worthwhile? Do people like it for the right reasons or for all of the wrong ones?_ But she doesn't bother, because what would be the use? It's Mark, to whom petty ethical quibbles count for nothing against the inexorable march of technology; Mark, who doesn't seem to grasp that just because you _can,_ it doesn't necessarily mean you _should._ Mark, who won't care or even realize if Erica Albright and every plain Harvard co-ed with a low Facemash rating ends up crying into her pillow tonight, because that kind of thing doesn't even register on Mark's radar.

Mark, who doesn't reckon up the human cost, ever; and Eduarda knows this already about her best friend, she _knows_ it, but what she fails to understand right down to her bones is exactly how far it goes.

 

**Mark**

It's been a busy week so they haven't seen each other much, but on Friday night Mark tracks Warda down to this lame Caribbean-themed Delta Gamma party to float the idea that's been growing in her mind ever since the Winklevoss twins sought her out. In Mark's hoodie the room is way too hot after the frigid outdoors, hotter still when Warda comes shimmying over, laughing, tipsy, wearing a lei and a flowered sarong and this coconut-shell...bra...thing. She looks _ridiculous_ and carries herself like she knows it, but there's still a whole hell of a lot of tanned girl torso out on display and Mark doesn't know where to look.

She takes off again after they talk – Eduarda darting gratefully back inside where it's warm, goosebumped arms clutching her red plastic cup to her chest – and she doesn't go to sleep at all that night but stays up working instead, fingers flying over the keys in that first big burst of inspiration, binging on research, drawing up whiteboards, reverse-engineering relevant features on MySpace and Friendster and figuring out what worked for them, what didn't, what she could do differently.

She doesn't plan to see anyone that weekend aside from the background presence of her roommates – hell, she doesn't even intend to go _outside_ \- but the next day Warda shows up randomly at the triple again the next day (it's noonish, and Mark still hasn't slept) and spreads out her study stuff, clearly busy enough with her own work that she'll pose no disturbance to Mark's coding.

It's a truly inconvenient fact, but Mark's body was not actually made to sit in computer chairs for eighteen hours straight – even if her brain totally was – and by now she's got a wicked backache. She doesn't mean to mention it, but she must make a face or a noise or something when she shifts in her chair, because Eduarda's head pops up from her studying and she asks, "Alright there?" with the usual faintly concerned look on her face.

"My fucking back," Mark says, making another face as she tries to reach back with her own hand and dislodge the hard ball of pain that's taken up residence right in between her shoulderblades. It doesn't work very well.

"Well maybe if you didn't rock such terrible posture _all_ the time," Eduarda says, on a sigh, and she gets up and comes over to Mark's chair, says, "Here, c'mere."

Mark cocks a skeptical eyebrow at her, but Eduarda just lifts her hands to Mark's shoulders and grips gently down. Mark can feel the press of the heavy watch on Eduarda's slender wrist, the heavy ring on one polished finger, as Eduarda digs her fingertips firmly down into the overtight muscles of Mark's neck and back.

"Unh," Mark says without meaning to, and slumps into it, her own hands pausing on the keyboard, because Eduarda's hands are squeezing the knots right out of her shoulders, leaving melty relief in their wake, and it's so good. She always gets kind of touch-starved when she's at school and not hooking up with anyone. Mark's taken human psych, she knows that optimally you need that shit, it's just she tends to forget about it in the same way she forgets about good nutrition or regular exercise or a steady sleep cycle. She hadn't realized she was missing it quite this much until right about now.

Eduarda's scritching her nails in soothing little ellipses over the bumps of Mark's first few vertebrae, asking in a soothing totally-not-feeling-you-out-for-stressors-here voice if the site is coming along okay, if the money will be enough, if her roommates are "treating her right" – laughter shading her voice a little, there, as Mark rolls her eyes: Warda likes to tease her about the nonexistent designs the guys might have on her virtue, despite the fact that Chris is gay, Dustin's the type to go through an endless series of crushes on unattainable strangers, and Mark exists firmly in the zero-mystery little-sister zone for the both of them.

She tells Mark that she's here for her, that Mark can always tell her anything, and Mark nods stiffly, exhaling into the rub of Warda's palms, uncomfortable as always with someone being this giving, this guilelessly open.

For a moment she kind of wants to vent to Warda about the gross sausagefest that is the Porc, about the Winklevoss twins and their easy, thoughtless arrogance, the way they'd talked down to her probably without even realizing they were doing it, how they'd never in a million years invite a girl like her into their club for parties but are plenty happy to pick her brain when theirs aren't good enough, how half of what's driving her to make this project work right now is the urge to throw their privilege and condescension right back in their matching smug handsome faces.

But instead she just ends up telling her about the other night when she and Dustin stayed up and marathoned the Indiana Jones trilogy and had the bright idea to make it into a drinking game and both got puking sick off all the shots they ended up doing, and then she rambles some more about site development, technical blather Eduarda _mm-hm_ 's along to even though Mark knows she probably understands one word out of twenty, and all the while her hands (which have apparently been secretly _magic_ all this time, and how did it take Mark this long into their friendship to find that out) keep kneading the horrible tension out of Mark's shoulders until the relaxation and Mark's coding binge start to catch up with her and her eyes fall closed for a second, breaking the flow of her fingers on the keys, the flow of her mumbled words.

When she blinks them open again, Eduarda's whispering, "Hey, Mark, hey," and her hands have switched from the massage to gently urging Mark up from the chair. "You keep going all microsleep on me, okay, maybe you should go to bed now."

"Fine, _Mom,"_ Mark mutters; but Warda's right, she really is exhausted, and once she staggers over to her bed and stretches out flat (and oh man, does _that_ ever feel good on the wrung-loose muscles of her back) she's falling asleep even before Eduarda has finished clearing her notes off the pillow.

 

**Eduarda**

"Hey," Eduarda says, poking her head in through the front door of the triple to check who's in, and back comes a "Saverin!" from Dustin, a "Sup" from Chris, and a total lack of acknowledgement from Mark, even though Eduarda can _see_ that she's right there on the couch, curled around her laptop like she's cuddling the damn thing.

Eduarda rolls her eyes, stepping into the room and insinuating herself into Mark's personal space. "Mark," she asks disbelievingly, "are you eating _raw ramen?"_ and Mark looks up at her kind of sheepishly, dry noodles crunching in between her teeth, and says, "Chris’s hotpot broke."

Eduarda snorts, dumping her bag down to sit by Mark. "This may be a new low for you," she says, pulling out her notebook and a highlighter.

"No no," Dustin says from behind his own computer, "that would be last weekend, when she was on the rag and ran out of...stuff and spent a day and a half sitting there anyway, coding this thefacebook thing."

That's legitimately horrifying. "MARK! You're going to get toxic shock or something."

Mark shrugs distractedly at her, makes an _I'll get you back for ratting me out just as soon as I can pry myself away from this computer_ face at Dustin, who wrinkles his freckled nose right back at her. "It's a shame you can't handle the idea that girls can be as gross as you are," she monotones, and then jumps a little as the telltale vibration of a cell phone sounds from the pocket of her sweatpants.

"You are _definitely_ the grossest one out of all of us," Chris says.

"I'm okay with that," Mark answers, checking the display. She makes another face – uglier than the one she aimed at Dustin - pokes at the button to turn the phone off and chucks it into a handy pile of dirty laundry.

"Who're you blowing off now," Eduarda asks, biting the cap off her highlighter.

"The Winklevii again," Mark says dismissively, turning back to her laptop. "Some boys really can't take a hint. Hey, you want to hit the d-hall with me? I'm almost done here."

Eduarda looks down at her just-begun work.

"Yeah," she says, "sure."

 

**Mark**

Last spring, on the night that midterms were over, they'd ended up at this ginormous rager thrown by an off-campus houseful of MIT students (Mark thinks that was it, anyway. By the time they got there it was already going hard enough that the hosts could have been Gandhi and Mr. T, and nobody would have known or cared). In what was probably an inevitable turn of events considering that it came right on the heels of a week and a half of not enough food or sleep for anybody, they'd both gotten _wasted,_ and later Eduarda had ended up bursting into tears in an upstairs bathroom.

"I'm sorry," she apologized over and over in this pathetic liquid garble while Mark looked on, helpless and uncomfortable. "I'm just really stressed about how I did on my Game Theory exam. If I didn't make at least a B Pai will hit the _roof,"_ and she'd proceeded to confide in Mark with the awful honesty of the very drunk about how she'd been a disappointment to her father from day one, how she was an only child and he'd wanted a son and had never really been able to totally reconcile himself to the daughter he got instead, how because of that he expects even _more_ from her than he would otherwise, how even when she does achieve shit it's still never enough, and so on and so forth while Mark just kept shoving fresh Kleenex at her because she didn't know what else to do.

"I'm sorry, god. I didn't mean to get my daddy issues all over you like that," she'd finished up, shaking her hair back out of her tear-wrecked face and turning to peer at herself in the vanity mirror (whatever she saw there made her shake her head again). "Can you hand me another -? Thanks," and she started pressing moistened tissues to the blotchy patches around her eyes.

Some belligerent dudebro type banged on the door, hollering, "Hurry it up in there!" and Mark spun on her heel, pressed her face right up against the crack in the door and hissed, _"Fuck the FUCKING fuck off"_ so venomously that the guy actually _did_ fuck off, which made Eduarda give a hiccup sound halfway between a sob and a laugh.

"Oh, Mark," she said, and Mark stayed quiet and watched her reapply her wept-off eyeliner – the expert crook of her wrist, her huge doe eyes as she blinked at her own reflection - with what was an amazingly steady hand considering that Eduarda was definitely still drunk off her ass. It reminded Mark a little bit of her own ability to work a keyboard with rapid-fire precision even when too trashed to do anything else.

"You want to get out of here?" she said eventually, unsure, and Warda nodded. "Okay. Let's –"

She'd put a tentative hand on Warda's back and steered her on out of there (down two sets of stairs and through the foyer and porch and yard, a veritable obstacle course for the inebriated) and walked back towards campus with her in the chilly spring night. Eduarda said hi to a couple of girls she knew, part of a group who was walking in the direction they'd just left - seeking out the same party, in fact – and Mark stood awkwardly beside her, hands shoved in her pockets, while Eduarda gave them directions to the place and bummed a cigarette, which she puffed slowly as she and Mark continued walking. Mark had only seen her smoke a handful of times, always when Warda was fairly tanked. Like most things, she looked good doing it.

They never really brought it up again, after. But when Eduarda cranes her neck down over Mark's shoulder, face lit by the blue screen glow, and murmurs, "You have no idea what that's going to mean to my father," Mark thinks back to that MIT party.

"Sure I do," she says, tapping the mouse to make the cursor hover over where the masthead says _Eduarda Saverin, Co-Founder and CFO,_ and the smile that Eduarda turns on her is blinding.

 

**Eduarda**

Eduarda pauses at the door of the triple and actually knocks for once rather than just walking in, because it's late on a Thursday night, which is party night. As are Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights. Eduarda considers her own social life active enough, but the way some people here carry on, she seriously can't fathom how they ever get any of their work done. (From somewhere down the hall there comes a faint crashing sound, a burst of laughter.)

She raps her knuckles gently against the wood, checking whether anyone's even home and, if so, whether they'd rather not be disturbed right now on account of how they're getting laid or something. But from inside Mark's voice goes, "Yeah, come in," and so she does.

It's really a nice feeling, walking into somebody's space and knowing for sure, just from their face, that they're happy to just _see_ you. Especially when that somebody is a freaking robot like Mark. Mark, who's grinning up from the couch, visibly pleased, saying, "Warda."

She's sitting like she always does, like a guy, legs in their plaid pajama pants splayed wide as she tosses one of Chris's plastic molecular models from hand to hand. On the coffee table in front of her there's an open beer, an open laptop set to fullscreen media player, something anime-looking that Mark is desultorily half-watching - but mostly, now, she's paying attention to Eduarda for once. It's rare that Mark is this receptive to company, but it does happen occasionally and Eduarda savors it every time.

"I just walked past some guy having a full-on nervous breakdown outside of Widener," she says, unwrapping her scarf and dropping it over the back of a chair. "Sobbing, screaming - the works."

"I've overheard like five of those in the lab this past month, and that's excluding midterms and Dustin's regularly scheduled Sunday night problem set freakouts," Mark says. She reaches out and taps the spacebar, freezing the show, which appears to be about girls fencing. "It's amazing there aren't _more_ suicides per semester here, honestly. Want a beer?"

She's clearly a beer or two in herself. Mark's speech patterns always get even faster and more clipped when she's been drinking, at least up to a certain point, after which they plunge rapidly into sloppy incoherence just like anybody else's.

Eduarda says, "I probably shouldn't, I'm pretty buzzed already," and she drops down onto the couch next to Mark and tells her about ditching the bar and the people from her hall that she'd gone with, how she'd totally planned to have a nice night out but she must have worked herself harder than she thought this week, or be getting sick or something, because as soon as she got tipsy she got _tired._

Mark gestures at the laptop screen with both hands (bottle in one, ball-and-stick molecule in the other) and says, yeah, her plans were just to work on thefacebook tonight, but she hadn't been able to concentrate for some reason; she should have taken Dustin up on the invite to some CS kid's girlfriend's house party after all ("whoa," says Eduarda, serious-faced, "wait. A CS kid with a _girlfriend?"_ and dodges the bottlecap Mark flicks at her, laughing), but now it's like eleven and it wouldn’t even be worth it, at this point, not when she's got a test tomorrow morning.

Mark starts the show back up in the background, volume turned low, and they complain halfheartedly at each other about the amount of work they have (the number one default topic of conversation here on campus, like the weather or local sports teams anywhere else), and kill the last couple of beers between them.

"The guys'll bitch," Mark says through a yawn, "but whatever, it's their turn to buy the next thirty-rack anyway." She scratches absently at her stomach, which is swathed in a baggy oversize t-shirt that says EVERYONE LOVES A JEWISH GIRL across the chest, and slumps down even further on the couch, elbow bumping up against Eduarda's.

Eduarda, more buzzed than ever now, stares through the screen (on which the anime girls have apparently moved on to legitimate sword-fighting) and absently nuzzles her temple up against Mark’s shoulder before she really realizes what she's doing. Mark stiffens just a tiny bit like always, automatic, but she doesn't pull away or anything, and after a moment she relaxes again. That means she's got a decent buzz on, since by nature Mark is about as far from Eduarda's easy tactility as it's possible to be. Eduarda's head feels sort of heavy so she lets it rest there, feels the muscles of Mark's shoulder shifting minutely underneath to accommodate it, and yeah, no, she really can't wrap her mind around people like Mark who aren't big on this kind of thing, because it's seriously just – _nice._

"Personal space invasion," Mark notes tonelessly, because buzzed or sober, she can still be depended upon to be an asshole.

"That's right," Eduarda agrees cheerfully, eyes slipping shut as she droops even more of her weight down against Mark’s side. "What are you going to do about it?"

Above her Mark's head tilts, like it was an actual question and she's trying to formulate an answer – and then they both jump as the door bangs open and Billy Olsen comes stumbling through, baked beyond belief and looking for a lighter because (it transpires) the very last one in his smoking circle just died.

"Ill-prepared," Mark snarks, sitting up and sort of shaking Eduarda off.

Billy hangs his head, mock abjection. "I know, we'd make shitty Boy Scouts."

Eduarda keeps a lighter at the bottom of her purse for the occasional drunken cigarette. She fishes it out, now, tosses it over to Billy in a gentle underhand loop, and his face lights up like only the truly high's can. "Oh, fuck, thanks, you're a lifesaver. Hey! You guys should c'mon over and join us. Wanna?"

Eduarda glances at Mark, and Mark tilts her eyebrows just so, and "Yeah," "Sure," they say over each other, and follow Billy back to his dorm where people are burning incense and playing Pink Floyd on vinyl, plastic bags duct-taped over the smoke detectors and everyone already all mellow and chill.

It turns out that Billy's new girlfriend is actually in Eduarda's econometrics class and they have a couple of mutual friends in PfoHo, and Mark gets into a long drawn-out stoned argument with one of Billy's roommate's friends that (from what Eduarda can gather through her haze) manages to encapsulate both the Aeneid _and_ the history of Fortran, and the next time she thinks to glance at her watch it's two thirty in the morning and Eduarda barely has the energy to walk Mark back to her door before stumbling home across the Yard to her late, late bed.

 

**Mark**

"Let's go get a drink and celebrate. I'm buying," Eduarda volunteers, and Mark closes her eyes for a moment, letting herself savor it - the relief of thefacebook's launch, the apprehension of its reception, all of the ways that this could possibly go – before she opens them again, says, "Yeah, sure. Why the fuck not, right?"

"Awesome, just give me one second," Eduarda says, and rummages in her purse. Mark watches her as she slicks on lipstick in a restrained pink, asking Mark, "Is that necklace I left here last weekend still -?"

"Yeah, it's right there on the dresser," Mark says. She picks up the fleece that's draped over the end of her bed, sniffing it before she pulls it over her head.

Mark's still not technically even supposed to be able to get into bars, but Eduarda smiles their way in, somehow, and turns to wink at Mark as soon as they're past the door guy. It's already late and the place is packed; scoring a table is out of the question, but they manage to snag seats up at the bar itself. Eduarda orders them a couple of overpriced microbrews and then turns to grin at Mark, crinkle-eyed and conspiratorial.

Mark drinks in big thirsty slugs, talking in between them about plans and strategies, about expanding to other schools. The music's really loud and they have to lean in ridiculously close and shout just to hear each other, and it's got this low thrum of excitement running under Mark's skin, all of it: the night and the bar and thefacebook and the thrill of getting away with something, of being young and brazen and whip-smart and full of potential, of daring to reach out and take things people said they couldn't have, and – man, she's getting sloshed and grandiose exceptionally fast, tonight. Maybe she should have eaten something more than a couple of stale Powerbars all day. Or maybe it's just the close scent of Warda's perfume going to her head.

Eduarda buys another round, and another, and at intervals Mark keeps whipping out her phone to check in with Dustin, making sure that everything's going okay with the infant site, that there hasn't been a huge horrible crash yet or anything.

"Mark, unplug for just one night," Eduarda says, after the tenth text.

Mark twists one corner of her mouth up. "Yes, because I do that _ever."_

She puts the phone away, though, and continues with the sleep-deprived and increasingly intoxicated rambling about how if this takes off the way she thinks it might, it could change everything - getting more wildly speculative as she gets drunker, over-the-top _revolutionize the entire social experience of college_ stuff - just to see the way Warda smiles fondly, hopefully at her when she does. She teases Mark about wanting her picture on the cover of _Forbes_ , and Mark tells her with complete honesty, "I think they'd rather have _your_ picture on their cover," which makes Eduarda laugh and turn gratifyingly pink around the nose.

They'll show them all, she thinks – the ones that everybody overlooked and underestimated, a couple of undergrad girls not even within spitting distance of twenty-five yet but it doesn't matter because Mark had an _idea_ , an idea with _promise_ , she had it and Eduarda backed it up with that strongest guarantor of good faith, money, and together they're making it happen, and nobody's going to take that away from them. Not the Winklevii with their douchebag good looks and bred-in-the-bone entitlement, not _anybody_. If she plays her cards right she thinks thefacebook could be big, for Harvard kids at least and maybe further, maybe for kids at other schools too: she could make it unignorable, could be _known_ for making it, right there on that masthead, her and Warda taking over the fucking world together.

She flags the bartender down for another round. When she turns back around, there's this gross older dude all up in their faces, blatantly interrupting their conversation to hit on Warda. No surprise there. In the course of their friendship Mark has had to get used to _that_ particular annoyance – it's one of the many depressing features of having a hot best friend – and usually she just ignores it till it blows over, but this one's pushier than usual. He keeps trying to insist on buying Warda a drink, never mind that the empties sitting in front of them are ample evidence of the fact that Warda can buy her own drinks with her own money that she made herself, and Warda's too damn soft-voiced and polite to get her repeated refusals through his thick skull.

Wishing that she were built like a Winklevoss for the sole sake of moments like this, Mark slants her best cold-eyed glare up at the guy. But he ignores it and he just keeps _pushing,_ and Warda looks desperately from him to Mark, and Mark's totally about to spit out something clever and cutting enough to eviscerate his ego and make him crawl away in shame, she just needs a second to marshal her drunk-and-disorderly thoughts –

Warda blurts out, "Listen, I'm really sorry, but I'm here with my girlfriend," and she's taking Mark's hand, linking their fingers on the bar top, and it's all Mark can do to not pull back reflexively out of sheer surprise. "So, um -" and the guy looks at both of them and kind of sneers, but the important part is that he leaves.

The second he's out of earshot (or maybe not even quite yet, oops) they look at each other and start snickering helplessly, drunk and relieved. Warda lets go of Mark's hand and says, "God, sorry about that," and Mark says, "Whatever, it worked," and brings her hand back up to high-five Eduarda, only they're blitzed enough to _miss,_ and that makes them both laugh so much harder that they nearly fall off their barstools.

They're basically completely sloppy by the time they return to Kirkland – Warda carrying her stilettos in one hand because she's too bombed to balance on them – and Mark lets them into the triple only to find that Chris has hung a bright pink sock prominently on his bedroom doorknob and from behind said door is coming the unmistakable sound of a headboard slamming repeatedly against the wall.

"Ugh," she says, rolling her eyes. "Now I'm going to have to sleep with headphones on."

"You can come crash at mine if you want," Eduarda offers, "rather than risk being scarred for life."

"My eyes have already been assaulted by Dustin's naked white ass twice this month. I think that ship has sailed," says Mark; but she tromps on over to Warda's room anyway.

Warda clears off the couch for Mark to pass out on, then pulls out her laptop, saying, "I'm just gonna check my email a second," and Mark says, "Oh hey, first lemme show you something."

She logs on (smiling to herself a little when thefacebook loads perfectly, no problems) and pulls up the profile she's set up: _Eduarda Saverin._ With no small sense of pride she scrolls through it, showing Warda where she's filled in her concentration _(Economics),_ class year _(2005),_ employment _(thefacebook: Chief Financial Officer)_ and even her picture.

"It was the second thefacebook profile ever created," she tells Warda proudly, "after mine," and Eduarda turns a big, drunk, starry smile on her, leans in and kisses Mark on the cheek. It lingers there, a tiny hotspot.

"Thank you," she says sincerely. "Can you show me how to change the picture?"

Mark frowns. "What, you don't like this one?" She'd used a posed shot of Eduarda at some Investors Association function, perfectly coiffed and suited up, gazing at the camera with her best professional smile. She looks like a model, only smarter. Mark doesn't get why she'd want to change it.

"No, no, I do. Just –"

Mark goes to _Change Profile Picture,_ and their fingers bump as Eduarda commandeers the mouse, selects a new image file and lets it load in the profile-picture slot (a bit slowly for Mark's tastes, she's going to have to see if she can work on that). It's an unglamorous candid of her and Mark goofing off at a party in someone's dorm, mugging for the camera with big drunk grins, Eduarda's arm around Mark's shoulder.

Mark snorts at the photo, says, "Anyway, it's all yours, knock yourself out," as she relinquishes the laptop, lets herself sink back into the couch. It's late, and she's drunk, and she passes out at some point after Warda says _'Night_ in that soft way of hers and then starts knocking around in the bathroom.

She wakes sore, gritty-eyed, and late for class; sits up, wincing at what that does to her back, to see Eduarda perched on the arm of the couch, curling her eyelashes in between gulps from a stolen d-hall cup full of orange juice.

"Did you know you're constantly, like, clenching your jaw and grinding your teeth when you're sleeping?" she asks Mark conversationally. "I don't know how you stand it, it looks physically painful."

"A better question," Mark says, "might be, did you know it's weird and creepy to watch people sleep? God, and people call _me_ socially awkward."

" _You_ passed out on _my_ couch!" says Eduarda indignantly, and Mark quirks a tired _just messing with you_ half-smile at her and heads off to class in last night's clothes like the lame version of the walk of shame, the kind where nobody even got laid.


	2. Chapter 2

 

_I walk through your dreams and invent the future. Sure,_  
_ I sink the boat of love, but that comes later. And yes, I swallow_  
_glass, but that comes later._  
_And the part where I push you_  
_flush against the wall and every part of your body rubs against the bricks,_  
_shut up_  
_I’m getting to it._

 

 

**Eduarda**

"Hey, what's up?" Eduarda swings in through the unlocked door of the suite and finds Mark wired in like she always is these days in soft gray sweatpants and a henley, feet curled up underneath her, blanket draped over her shoulders.

Mark's hands pause on the keyboard as she nods infinitesimally in acknowledgement of Eduarda, takes a minute to pick up her open carton of yogurt. She appears to be trying to eat it with a plastic fork. It's not working all that well for her. Eduarda rolls her eyes, scoffs, "Let me guess: you just could not be fucked to get up and find a spoon?"

Mark pulls her headphones down, lets them dangle around her neck as she turns the blank frown of an interrupted sleepwalker on Eduarda. "Huh?"

"Or, no. You _have_ no spoons," Eduarda says, rifling disbelievingly through the mess of communal dishes on the coffee table. "How is it possible to have three people living together who own eight and a half expensive-ass computers between them and not a single spoon?"

 _"Wha?"_ says Mark, scrunching up her eyes, which look as red and cashed-out as if she's spent the whole day smoking up rather than staring at a screen.

"Hang on," Eduarda tells her, and she goes next door and knocks. Fortunately the guys who live there have seen Eduarda on their hall a million times, since she spends half her life visiting the triple, and she's pretty sure one of them thinks she's cute, so she just gives him her best charming smile and says brightly, laughing a little, "Hi! Uh...this is ridiculous, sorry, but do you by any chance have a spoon I could borrow?"

"Oh hey, that _is_ better," Mark says, a minute later, and she quirks a tiny smile up at Eduarda, surfacing properly, now, out of her work like someone coming up from REM or deep water, back into the land of practical matters such as _oh yeah, semiliquid substances are really best eaten with a spoon._

Eduarda grins back and swings into Mark's space, eyeing the blocks of code onscreen like she has the slightest clue what they mean. She's close enough to hear the music still spilling from Mark's dangling headphones. Mark codes exclusively to hypnotically bass-heavy stuff, either from the electronica family – your trance-triphop-techno-house-industrial-darkwave-whatever – or rap of a sinister-sounding persuasion, threats and come-ons sneered over deceptively lazy beats, lyrics that make Eduarda vaguely uncomfortable.

She asks, "Have you been at this all day?"

"I went to class," Mark says, glancing at the screen, clearly itching to get back to it already. "Otherwise, yes."

Eduarda scritches her fingers through Mark's curls. Her hand comes away kind of greasy. "Shower time, Zuckerberg," she says, and Mark makes a _yeah-yeah_ blowoff noise. "Cleanliness is next to sexiness."

"All available evidence would suggest that neither is a priority concern of mine," Mark mumbles, already distracted again, and Eduarda huffs, flops back onto Mark's bed and pulls her doorstopper of a Government textbook out of her bag, not even bothering to say _don't mind me_ because she knows from experience that Mark won't.

Mark finishes her yogurt in three more efficient bites, pulls her headphones back up and plugs in again, her bare feet under the desk unconsciously pulsing to the low steady heartbeat of the music, and over the top of her book Eduarda watches Mark slip back under, fingers moving furiously, eyes darting back and forth over the screen, left-right-down, left-right-down.

 

**Mark**

At the edge of Mark's peripheral vision, Chris is snooping through the plastic shopping bags of groceries and toiletries that she brought back to the dorm earlier today and hasn't bothered to unpack yet. She's checking her email and not really paying attention to him, at least not until he holds something up and says in a weirded-out tone, "You bought this?" and she glances over.

It's a tube of the mascara that Eduarda has worn every day for as long as Mark has known her, this fancy shit with a French name that Mark can't remember because she doesn't know jack about that kind of thing. But at breakfast today Warda was complaining about her last tube running dry, and Mark was making an epic stock-up shopping run into Boston anyway, so she picked it up for her. Which is how she knows for sure that it's unreasonably expensive. Warda better pay her back.

"It's Warda's," she says. "I guess she ran out and she legit won't leave her dorm without that shit on, which is fucking ridiculous but whatever –"

"So you went and got it for her."

"I was doing errands anyway, so."

Chris squints up at her over the ramen packages he's rifling through. "You know what _mascara_ she wears? No, scratch that, you know what mascara _is?_ I – didn't think you even owned makeup."

"I don’t," Mark says distractedly, turning back to her desktop. It's true: makeup always just looks unconvincing on her, out of place somehow, and Eduarda knows better than to offer to make her over or any of that bullshit. "Or. In the winter I use Chapstick, I guess."

"I don't think Chapstick counts."

"It's the cherry kind, it's like. Pink."

Chris laughs, shaking his head. "And yet you know Eduarda's mascara brand."

Mark frowns at him, lets her voice go acerbic. "Yeah. Is that not a normal thing for normal girls who are normal friends?"

"Uhh," says Chris. "Sure, for all I know, it totally is. It's just kind of funny for _you."_

Mark snorts. "Quit going through my shit," she says, turning back to her work. She hits the wrong key, accidentally opens eighty-some tabs at once, and starts swearing a blue streak at her crashed browser.

"Kay," Chris says. "Hey, can I have some of this mac and cheese?"

 

**Eduarda**

The crowd that assembled in the CS basement to watch Mark "interview" Facebook interns is finally beginning to disperse, done with shots and music and cheering, and when Eduarda checks her watch it's past anyone's reasonable bedtime; so she heads over to where Mark's talking to some well-wisher, taps her on the shoulder and says, "I think I'm gonna head out now."

Mark looks up. "You were gonna go back to Eliot tonight? Oh."

In Mark-speak that's as big a hint as you're likely to get, so Eduarda ends up waiting around until Mark's finally done here, and then follows her back to Kirkland instead. On the walk over Mark talks animatedly about her plans, _Facebook's_ plans, for the summer, and she's practically glowing with delighted triumph, riding the adrenaline high of having her name on every page of the hottest thing on campus, _a Mark Zuckerberg production_. It's like the night Mark made Facemash, and just like that night it draws Eduarda in, somehow, magnetic.

Eduarda can read Mark in a way that most people probably can't, and in Mark's fast, jittery chatter she thinks she hears the thread of underlying, unacknowledged fear as well. _What if the servers go down, what if all of it's just a flash in the pan, what if I can't make good on the potential of this thing, what if what if what if._ It's no wonder she wanted company tonight, and Eduarda jumps at the chance to give it. Lately Mark's been scrambling so hard to keep up with the rapidly expanding site that she barely even has time for class anymore – Eduarda knows for a fact that she’s been skipping all over the place – let alone for hanging out.

When they arrive at the triple she sees that Mark's already been packing for California: there's a suitcase open at the foot of her bed, board shorts and flip-flops spilling out of it. Mark scoops a stack of dense-looking technical manuals off the couch so they can sit down, glances at the covers before throwing them into the suitcase as well.

There's still the larger part of a fifth of Jack Daniels left over from the interns' drunken audition, and Mark grabs a two-liter of Coke out of the fridge, a couple of coffee mugs from the communal dish pile.

"Don't you have an exam tomorrow?" Eduarda says. "And it's stupid late already."

"I'm not gonna be able to sleep any time soon, anyway," is all Mark says. "Are you joining me or not?" and of course Eduarda does.

They slouch back into the couch and zone out to the TV for a bit – there's a news story about the new email client that Google's releasing in beta, already controversial because of privacy concerns about its advertising, and that holds Mark's interest – and go through the JD kind of fast in the meantime. As the show cuts to commercial, Eduarda thinks of something she'd meant to tell Mark. "Remember those guys we met at the Gates talk the other night?"

Mark rolls her eyes. The pair in question had professed interest in going out and discussing site specifics over a drink, and Eduarda would have liked to go, but Mark had blown them off. "They were _hitting_ on us," she'd muttered to Eduarda, after.

"Yeah?" she says, pouring her – third? – cup of heavily laced soda.

"One of them Facebooked me –"

"Which one?"

"The cute Asian one? Christian something. Lee? Anyway, so he was saying that he knows some real movers and shakers he could maybe introduce us to, or whatever."

Mark rolls her eyes again. "That's just what guys say when they're out to get their dicks wet, Warda. And even if he does actually know anyone, which I doubt in the first place, he'd probably expect a" – heavy sarcasm – " _return_ on the favor."

"He seemed like a nice guy," Eduarda protests.

Mark turns her head, fixes her with that beady-eyed stare, and asks point-blank: "Are you interested in him?"

Eduarda blinks, takes a long sip to buy time. "...I don't think anything's going to happen there, no," she says carefully, after a moment. "But, if he could help, for the company?"

Mark looks off to the side, and Eduarda isn't sure, but she thinks she's smirking. No, smiling. Kind of triumphantly? "Sure. Of course."

She tops off her drink – Eduarda sees that by now the bottle's nearly empty, and when did _that_ happen – and makes a couple of pointed comments about how oh, _now_ guys are paying attention to her, now that she's made such a splash on campus, how obnoxiously _obvious_ it is that they're suddenly pretending to be interested just because of Facebook, how bad they are at hiding that fact, and so on.

"I mean, obviously _you_ can't relate," she continues, absently, "because of how you're beautiful –"

Eduarda's mouth says, without her permission, "Wait you think," before her brain can catch up and stop _that_ sentence in its tracks.

"- so people have always hit on you anyway. But just trust me, it's obnoxious," Mark finishes obliviously, and after a minute of no response, she glances at Eduarda. "What'd you say?"

Eduarda's brain decides to just let it go, not to push anything, certainly not at an already crazy juncture like this one. They're best friends, business partners in a venture that's just taking off; it'd be stupid to risk jeopardizing any of that right now. And then her mouth says anyway, "Mark, you think I'm...?"

Mark glances away, back again, quick-darting eyes. A shrug of shoulders, making her collarbones flex, delicate wings of bone at the stretched-out neck of her Phillips Exeter t-shirt. "It's not a matter of my _opinion,_ it's just an objective fact." Her voice stays completely flat, but it's a shade more hurried than before, and when Eduarda looks at her closely there is – holy fuck, hold the phone, ladies and gentlemen – the very beginnings of a dull flush burning high on Mark's cheekbones.

Eduarda tries to demur modestly or, failing that, to laugh it off, but her mouth is suddenly too dry to do so. Instead she fiddles with her ring and just grins at Mark, unable to hide how pleased she is - she doesn't even care if that makes her shallow - and Mark grins back, sort of tentative but it's real, showing her elusive dimples for once. Which – the blush plus the dimples is one hell of a double whammy, oh man, Mark is _seriously_ underestimating her own appeal here.

"You need to stop talking about yourself like you're some sort of – hideous troll or whatever," she says, "because seriously, Mark, you're really not."

"And _you_ need to stop lying to your best friend's face," Mark retorts, but Eduarda just laughs and says, leaning in, "Yeah, no, trust me, you’re really full of shit on this one."

Mark looks back at her, clearly just about ready with another refutation, and Eduarda's hands must have joined forces with her traitorous mouth at some point because there's one of them going out to Mark's face, like it's hoping to prove some point to Mark about her bright eyes and soft curls and red lips and –

She reaches in and thumbs at the sharp line of Mark's jaw, the delicate hollow below her cheekbone, tracing the smooth downy dips of one unplucked eyebrow, one unpierced earlobe, and Mark watches her right back. She's holding perfectly still, frozen but for the increasing speed of her breathing, and Eduarda's stomach skips and sinks like a stone.

 _Oh god was I wrong,_ she just barely has time to wonder, before Mark snaps out of stasis – jerking one of her own hands up to catch Eduarda's wrist, ducking her head and flushing even darker, and then she's swaying in and practically shoving her mouth onto Eduarda's.

Mark's lips are half parted already and Eduarda tastes the toxic-sweet mix of sugar and alcohol there. Her mouth is wet inside, even without any tongue yet, and so _hot,_ and it's all Eduarda can do to hold her body back, keep it apart from Mark's where they're sitting close on the couch. She doesn’t know whether it's the same for Mark or not, but it's seriously taking every ounce of self-restraint she possesses to keep from crushing herself into Mark's chest, pressing their breasts together.

Mark's lips move tentatively on hers and it's all so overwhelmingly too-much that Eduarda has to pull away just to breathe. She blinks her eyes open, dazed, and in front of her Mark's fumbling blindly for her drink, finishing it in one long swallow.

Eduarda opens her mouth. Nothing comes out, at first, and she has to tell herself _this is MARK, you know how to talk to Mark._

"Just so I know," she says, forcing a light tone, "was that like a 'trying to erase that from my memory forever' drink or a 'I'm gonna need to get even more of a buzz on if I'm gonna keep going with this' drink?" - and Mark huffs a laugh, glances up at her through feathery lashes and says, "Uh, I guess more along the lines of the latter?"

"Thank fuck," says Eduarda, and surges back in.

This time she feels the swipe of Mark's tongue, right off the bat, and maybe it's the drinking they've been doing but it makes Eduarda _crazy_. Mark's hands are on her face, cradling her jaw, getting a better angle to open them up to one another, and Eduarda drags her tongue along Mark's lower lip in a long lush lick that's probably too blatantly dirty this early on but it feels fucking _fantastic_. Mark must think so too, because she half gasps into the corner of Eduarda's lips and kind of collapses into her, and the kissing turns sloppy-dirty in record time, Eduarda's lip balm smearing all over the fucking place, smudging pink all around Mark’s open, panting mouth.

She shifts backwards on the couch, her body sinking back against the arm as Mark crawls forward and over and on top of her, no fucking around, though her face looks flustered in a way it rarely does. Eduarda fists one of her hands in Mark's baggy t-shirt, rucks it up over Mark's stomach, up to her ribcage, Mark biting her bottom lip as she watches, eyes wide. She isn't wearing a bra underneath and when Eduarda smoothes a palm over the soft swell of one breast, touching through the one thin layer of fabric, Mark goes to _town_ on that lip, chewing it half to pieces.

She presses forward more, further, until they're touching _all over_ and Eduarda's hips hitch up desperately looking for – oh - _friction,_ holy god. Between her legs it's like melting point, and that's _before_ Mark's trembling fingers start on the buttons of Eduarda's silk blouse and she gets one thigh in between Eduarda's, rubbing themselves both up into a slow frenzy.

"Why is this - happening on the couch, anyway –" Eduarda breathes. "You do have a bed -"

From above her Mark says, "'cause I don't want to get up. Do _you_ want to get up?" and she grinds her hips down into Eduarda's, and no, come to think of it, Eduarda does _not_ want to get up right now.

Mark actually tears Eduarda's thigh-highs in her hurry to get them off and get a hand up her slim wool skirt. She doesn't even pause to apologize for it, just slips her hand between Eduarda's legs, working to catch a sense of her rhythm first, pulsing the heel of her hand steadily against her clit through the thin layer of black boyshort underwear as Eduarda’s hands flutter like wounded birds by her sides.

Her toes are curling, her breathing getting more and more urgent, and she pushes herself insistently into Mark's cupped palm until Mark gets the picture and gets her hand inside the fabric, onto actual flesh. Eduarda hisses and her fingers come up, tangle into Mark's curly hair and hang on hard. Mark's eyes are up so _close,_ the color of the sea off the coast at Santos during a storm, graybluegreen depending how the light hits them but they always go scary dark when her focus is tuned in on something and right now they're fucking burning through Eduarda's skin.

She can feel her core tightening like a fist closing, fuck, she just needs a little – more - Mark bends down and kisses her again, this time with a bite to it; slides in just the tips of two fingers right where she needs it, where she's wet and open, and Eduarda clenches down around them, gasping out a curse in Portuguese. As she comes she throws one arm up over her eyes, overwhelmed, and Mark reaches up with the hand that isn't busy and pushes her arm aside, looking down so she can see Eduarda's face.

 

**Mark**

Honestly Mark is usually more selfish in bed than this, knows what she wants and is out to get it. But underneath her Warda's lost her skirt, shoes, the ruined hose, her blouse's undone completely and hanging half off her shoulders, breasts heaving in the cups of her black bra, and she looks so gorgeously _wrecked_ that Mark has to pause in the middle of kissing her through her comedown and murmur, their lips still brushing, "Can you go again?"

Eduarda's eyebrows shoot up, startled dark arches, but she nods weakly.

"Good," Mark says, and she takes a second to press her fingers to Warda's swollen mouth before sliding down into the V of her legs. Her underwear's still technically on, nothing but a drenched and twisted scrap by now, and she's so turned on that Mark can _smell_ it.

"God you're wet," she breathes - not even meaning to be dirty, just stating a fact – and above her she hears Eduarda choke on a moan as she noses her way in between her thighs. She licks at the crotch of the panties, soaking them even more with the flat of her tongue; her mouth is literally watering.

"Take these off," she says, and Eduarda nearly knees her in the eye in her hurry to do that. She's more gawky than graceful at this, all those long limbs going everywhere, way less smooth than Mark had fantasized she'd be, but that's okay, that's actually kind of great -

For a moment it's just this whole hot mess of Mark trying to figure out where to put her elbows and Eduarda trying to figure out how to avoid kicking her, because honestly probably the couch really _isn't_ ideal for this but Mark could give a fuck right now, not when she has these perfect planes of hips and stomach and breasts stretched out flat below her, this bendy-sweet bundle of girl caged in between her arms. Then the damned panties drop to the floor beside the couch, forgotten, and Mark runs a hand up the smooth inside of Eduarda's thigh.

Eduarda hisses and her legs fall open automatically, and Mark doesn't waste any time teasing, just sinks her fingers right back in where they belong and licks around them, slow steady drags over and over.

"Fuck," Warda breathes, "Mark," drawing both vowels out long, teeth catching hard on the _k_ 's.

Mark crooks her fingers at the last knuckle and flutters them, the pads of her fingertips pressing right in against that spot, and Eduarda convulses beneath her, around her, nearly sobs when Mark tilts her chin up a little further, enough to rasp the flat of her tongue over the hood of her clit while she keeps thrusting her fingers. In and out and she adds another one, listens to Warda groan and curls one of her own feet underneath herself so that she can sink her bare heel into her own crotch and rock against it, easing a little of the hot hurt there.

Warda comes even faster this time, the long line of her back bowing up from the cushions as she writhes, head tossed back and her hair finally messed out of its shellacked perfection, tumbling around her face. She's still gasping as Mark pulls her fingers out, wipes them off on the already sticky bare skin of Eduarda's thigh.

"Shit, oh shit. Oh jesus," and Eduarda's laughing a little, shakily, recovering. "Wait - hang on, I should," and she raises an unsteady hand up to detach the earrings that are glinting from underneath her now-totally-fucked hair, stretches over to set them on an end table. They're dangly and fragile, expensive looking, nothing you'd want to lose in the bowels of this couch, which has been known to swallow people's flash drives without a trace.

She pushes a heavy lock of hair out of her eyes, looks down at Mark, eyes flickering from her face to her body. "I kind of –" she admits, gnawing on her bottom lip. "I don't know what –"

Mark snorts a laugh. "It's not rocket science," she says, and grabs impatiently for Warda's hand. "Here."

She tangles their fingers together, _touch me,_ pressing to show exactly where, how hard, hauling her t-shirt up over her head, _suck me,_ and Eduarda picks up on it quickly enough that soon Mark can hand things over to her (pun intended, yes, thank you) and lie back, sinking into the bone-deep relief of letting her mind shut off and her body take over. Eduarda's generous mouth closes over one nipple, her licked-slick fingers come up to circle round the other, and when Mark glances down all she can see through her half-closed eyes is pink and warm and wet, wet, wet.

She's still talking, sort of, not very coherently, telling Warda what to do, and she can hear her own monotone threatening to break into high-pitched breathy porn moans at every second, doesn't let it: _a little harder, but not faster - yeah – good, that's – little faster now but NOT harder, right - there – there there there don't stop if you stop I'll - ah, ahh, ahhh._

 _"Fuck,"_ she says with feeling, finally, and inhales. It _stinks_ of sex in here, the common room, and Chris and Dustin are still _asleep_ a wall away, oh, man.

"Yeah," Eduarda murmurs back, and giggles, sounding dazed and drunk and sleepy. "Can we – your bed? – I think I need to lie down," and Mark's legs feel so weak beneath her that it's all she can do to get herself and Warda up from the couch and stumble over to Mark's bedroom, swinging the door shut after them.

 

**Eduarda**

Eduarda wakes up to the full-on light of eight-forty a.m. and the sleep-blurred sight of Mark stumbling around the dorm, shoving her feet into sandals as she scrapes together the contents of her bookbag. She's got the hood of her sweatshirt up and inside it her face is all drawn and pinched, but Mark always looks like that in the mornings, so Eduarda very carefully assumes nothing yet.

"Got that exam?" she says, her voice coming out raspy, and Mark looks over at her.

"Yeah," she says, making a face. "I think I'm still a little drunk, fuck."

"You'll do fine," Eduarda murmurs, and she burrows her head back into the pillow so that the relief won't show itself in her little, helpless smile. "'ll be great."

 _She_ doesn't have class until this afternoon, and Mark's bed in Kirkland is as good a place as any to get more sleep (Eduarda's stomach does a slow, happy roll, thinking it) while she can.

She's already slipping under by the time Mark's bustling-around sounds hit the point of _okay okay ready to go;_ hears Mark's soft huff of breath as the noises hesitate, briefly, next to the narrow bed, a moment's pause and Eduarda's sleepy, so sleepy she barely feels it when Mark reaches down and touches her cheek, two fingertips brushing cool and dry over Eduarda's skin; barely hears it as the door shuts behind Mark and Chris's voice can be heard from the common room: "...these were out here this morning, Mark, are they _yours?"_

Eduarda snickers to herself and goes back to sleep.

She wishes she hadn't though, because in that half-dream state she has this vivid, unfocused nightmare thing. It's - really shitty and upsetting, even just in the vague outlines of impressions that she manages to retain: the ominous throb of a beat somewhere back in her brain, blurry swirl of rainbow colors in the dark; a sick, helpless sense of inevitability, and a man, unknown, faceless, seducing Mark, taking her away from Eduarda, and Mark _letting_ him.

It's fucking stupid because Mark doesn't even _like_ men, and Eduarda tells herself that when she wakes again, shaken. Mark still hasn't come back.

 

**Mark**

Eduarda is sprawled out on the Kirkland couch, legs going for miles as she kicks off her high heels and massages the toes of one pantyhosed foot with the sole of the other, and she's talking about advertising again, about all the people in NYC to whom she plans to pitch Facebook. Mark, coding, half-listens with a slight frown, and inwardly she rolls her eyes. That she refrains from doing it outwardly too is a testament to Warda being one of the few people Mark can put up with at all.

Eduarda, Mark knows, is someone who believes that there are rules to this shit, whether you’re talking how to run an LLC's finances or the exact point that your neckline and hemline need to hit if you want to be taken seriously as a chick in business. Mark, on the other hand – even before she was a new convert to the Sean Parker school of thought, Mark didn't really buy into any of that. If they ever get to the point of having offices – and that's looking more and more like a real possibility, these days – Mark fully plans to run around them shoeless and braless just like she does now on campus, and people can deal with it or they can go fuck themselves. That's her approach and it seems to be working out for her pretty damn well so far. Like how right this minute she's writing code that will, when implemented, affect more than a hundred thousand college students across the nation, and she's doing it while wearing nothing but guys' boxers (what, they're comfy) and a jacket with the hood up because she hasn't washed her hair in four days. Again.

Ever since spring break, since that meeting with Sean, Mark's really been wondering if Warda is right for CFO of something like Facebook, after all. Too hidebound a traditionalist, maybe. Or maybe not, maybe she's just overthinking it. Maybe things will be different when Warda comes out to California for the summer - Mark's pretty much decided on Palo Alto, has started looking into houses for rent on Craigslist, even - and gets a sense of how things work out there.

Finally she gets up from her computer chair for a Red Bull and, on her way back, stops by the couch and stops Eduarda talking by bending down to kiss her. That ends up turning into an impromptu makeout break, Mark pulling Eduarda closer in with both hands on her ass and Eduarda unzipping Mark's jacket down enough to get at Mark's unsupported tits, and Mark's just about to suggest taking it to her bedroom when the door of the triple bangs open. Warda gets her hand out of the jacket just in time.

"Not that I'm objecting to the free girl-on-girl live show that's constantly playing in my living room these days," Dustin tells them, "but uhh, don't you have a single, Warda?"

Mark stands up with a huff and goes back to her desk, cockblocked. "Eat me, Dustin."

"You know," Dustin says, shaking his head sorrowfully, "lately my friends are always all, so Dustin, it must be fucking hot to have a girl roommate who's hooking up with another girl like right under your nose all the time. And I just have to be like, no, bro, not when I've seen at least one of them chug beer from a keg nozzle and then projectile vomit it all right back out thirty seconds later."

"I'm devastated by the fact that you wouldn't have sex with me, Moskovitz, truly. It's a good thing I still have your mom -"

But Eduarda interrupts her, and her face is turned toward Dustin but from what Mark can see of it it looks kind of weird. "Your friends know about us? Me and Mark?"

Dustin gives her a weird look right back. "Yeah? I'm actually pretty sure a lot of people thought you were together before you even _were_ together, but hey."

Mark's about to ask Warda if she's okay, because she’s still got that weird look on her face. But right then her email inbox suddenly lights up like Christmas with a deluge of user complaints about a nasty new glitch that's popped up in Facebook's private messaging system, and she has to throw herself into fixing that and shanghai Dustin into helping out, too, and in the chaos of it all it's possible that she misses the other problem that's right in front of her.

 

**Eduarda**

They have yet another argument - about the advertising thing, California, the C&D that's hanging over Mark's head like a letterbomb liable to explode at any minute – and it ends in sex, Eduarda's tongue and three of her fingers all shoved in Mark's cunt at once while Mark sets her teeth in her lip and groans, sweat standing out on her forehead. They're doing it in Kirkland again, the door not even all the way closed, and Eduarda wonders why it is, when she has a single to herself, that she always comes to Mark and Mark never comes to her.

She gets off - mouth sliding wet over Mark's neck and breast, thighs wrapped tight around Mark's sweat-hot palm – but afterwards she still feels wound too tight, and Mark basically just rolls over and hops right back onto her laptop without a pause. Soon she's deep into working out a bug, cursing angrily under her breath, and doesn't even seem to notice when Eduarda leaves.

Eduarda goes and holes up in Lamont and tries to shake off the uneasiness with some studying, but she can't concentrate. More and more, lately, this tension's been creeping in and insinuating itself between her and Mark like a solid object, something hard-edged and heavy. More and more, Mark's been talking like she's working from the assumption that she won’t be coming back to school in the fall, will be taking at least a semester off, maybe even dropping out for good. Her priorities are shifting; increasingly she's putting all her eggs in this one basket, and that's something in which Eduarda cannot afford to imitate her. Eduarda will be a rising senior, soon. She has to finish at Harvard – doing otherwise is not an option, period – and before that, this summer, she has other obligations as well.

"I can't come out to California," she tells Mark later that night, over the phone, too tired or cowardly or both to have this conversation in person.

"Why the hell not?" Mark says, after a second, sharp enough that Eduarda winces.

"There's this internship, at Lehman Brothers," she says. "Pai just got it for me through someone he knows, and I have to take it."

"But I need you out there with me," Mark says, dogged incomprehension. "You're my" - the pause is so infinitesimal that Eduarda's not sure if she's imagining it – "CFO."

"I _know,"_ Eduarda says. "But my father..."

"Sean said that that was where we needed to be," Mark's saying, and Eduarda inhales through her teeth, because if she never hears that name out of Mark's mouth again it'll be too soon. Fucking Sean Parker and his advice, that _dinner_ and the bad vibes he gave off at every turn: the casually calculating air with which he checked Eduarda out, making it clear that she was being assessed and found inconsequential; the shallow veneer of you-go-girl! pseudo-feminism that he wore every time he turned in Mark's direction, and the pathological paranoia that Mark couldn't see because – if she's being honest here – Mark is a little bit that way, too. If you ask Eduarda, the very _last_ thing Mark needs is to be encouraged in those tendencies, least of all by Sean, with his glib _go big or go home, baby_ bullshit. If Sean Parker says to head west, Eduarda would just as soon stay right the fuck where they are out east.

"My father," she says again, louder. "Mark, I can't. Things are _expected_ of me."

And that's true, as far as it goes. Because of who she is – her father's child, an attractive young woman in business - she has to prove herself twice as hard. Unlike some people, she can't just blithely say fuck it all and go swanning off to the West Coast for fun in the sun. Why can't Mark _understand_ that? It doesn't mean she's any less invested in the company, just - Eduarda wants to do her part, she does, she thinks Facebook is a great idea, but you need more than a great idea, especially in a notoriously risky field like tech startups: you need _money_. Look at the way the dotcom bubble popped just a couple of years back – she's studied it in classes: plenty of people had great ideas there, and it didn't stop them from losing their skins. It's easy enough to spout inspirational clichés if you're Sean Parker, but it's Eduarda's investment here and she means to protect it.

True as far as it goes; all perfectly good reasons, and still so far from the whole truth. Even with her three hundred thousand in oil futures, her three-quarters-done Harvard degree, Eduarda isn't good enough for her father. But if he knew that she was – into girls too, even, let alone actually hooking up with one...

The truth is that if she goes ahead with this - goes out to California with Mark this summer - it'll be a step in the direction of this being a _thing_ , of more and more people inevitably finding out, and eventually of a parental disappointment so cataclysmically enormous and final that it would make Pai's current opinion of his daughter look practically rosy.

She pictures it, living in that summer house with Mark and the guys and having everybody know about it, about _them,_ and she can't face it. She can't do it.

"I'm sorry," she says again, in a rush. "But, look, I'll be in touch whenever you need me, and you guys will have a great time out there, and it'll only be like three months. How much can happen in three months? Look, I have to study now," and she hangs up on a freshly pissed-off Mark, head throbbing.

 

**Mark**

She's jogging along on a cross-campus caffeine run when Cameron Winklevoss catches sight of her and chases her across Harvard Square, and she has to dodge into the Coop to lose him (good thing she's too short to be easily spotted over rows of bookshelves). It's not that she actually feels, like, threatened or anything - doing the physical intimidation thing on tiny female underclassmen doesn't really seem to jive with the whole gentlemen-of-Harvard deal - but she's not about to stick around and find out what he's got in mind instead.

Already the Winklevii are receding in her mental rearview mirror, their no-girls-allowed treehouse of a final club and its outdated relics of ritual fast losing their luster compared to the visions of Silicon Valley that Sean laid out before her at that dinner: working with people her own age on stuff that's the cutting edge of cool, no degrees or formal qualifications necessary and none of this sucking up to the old guard crap that Eduarda seems so hell-bent on doing. Mark's antsy to leave, can't wait to be done with this semester, ready and eager to power forward towards California, where it's all _happening_ , and already the twins and their daddy's lawyer feel like an irrelevant annoyance from her past, one she'd like to just brush off like a gnat and be done with it.

Soon enough the coast is clear, but by that point Mark's already gotten sucked into a fat new book on web design and ends up skimming through the whole thing, ignoring the glares the shop guy keeps shooting at her. When she looks up again it's gotten dark outside and the guy is saying "We close in five minutes" in a loud and pointed way, so she sticks the book back on the shelf, picks up her bag and leaves.

She's crossing the Square again when a familiar voice says from behind her, "Mark! Mark, wait up."

She hasn't seen Eduarda since the night Eduarda informed her she'd be staying in New York this summer. It's not that she's been avoiding her on _purpose;_ it's just that every time she thinks of her she's reminded of the prospect of a summer without her, and the cross, crappy feeling that that produces in Mark's stomach is a real focus-ruiner. And also she's been - to put it mildly - busy. But Warda's a far preferable sight to a Winklevoss, in any case, so Mark lets her fall into step beside her.

Warda looks all kinds of stressed out, which is standard for her by this point in the semester, and Mark half listens while she goes on about how much work she has and how she's been popping Adderall like candy all week and has to go talk to one of her profs tomorrow and is freaking out about that, and so on and so forth. When under pressure, Eduarda can be kind of a drama queen.

"And right now I'm going to have to pull an all-nighter," she finishes, sighing hugely and flailing her hands around.

Mark has slept maybe two and a half nights out of the last seven, so she's hard pressed to feel sympathetic. "I was planning to stay up too, get some work done on Facebook."

"Oh, in that case, you want to do it together?" Warda says immediately, just as Mark had known she would.

"Sure," she says, and they head over to Dworkin together, hole up in the lounge.

Mark's got her laptop and her energy drinks and that's all she needs to slip into the zone, but Eduarda only makes it about an hour into studying before her eyes flutter shut, her body slumps into the couch they're sharing, and her head drops half onto her books and half onto Mark’s thigh. Mark shifts uncomfortably until Eduarda's head settles into her lap, then just ignores her and goes on working. She should wake her up, maybe, but Warda's pretty out of it, barely stirring even when Mark says her name, and Mark can't be bothered to try further when she's this busy. Warda's probably better off getting a couple hours of sleep than staring at the same two pages of text for fifteen minutes at a time like she'd been doing, anyway.

She takes a break from coding to check her email. There's a new message from their prospective landlord in Palo Alto, laying out the details of a three-month lease on the house. It makes Mark glance down at Eduarda's sleep-peaceful face, the worry lines all smoothed away for a little while, and – man, she still can't believe that she's going to have to do this whole summer without Warda right there to be counted on like usual. Mark's had that for nearly two years, and now when she _actually_ needs it –

As much as Mark can't wait to get out of here and make tracks west, she's also kind of terrified, a constant hard knot of tension in her stomach. She doesn't often feel especially young, _too_ young, only nineteen, but she's feeling that way right now. More and more she's betting everything on this, on Facebook working out. It _has_ to work out. Mark doesn't know what she'll do if it doesn't. She imagines returning to Harvard with her tail between her legs, an ashamed failure, and knows she can't let that happen. But to avoid it they're going to have to work like crazy and take some big risks, and she needs everybody on board one hundred percent. Mark has never remotely wanted to have kids, personally, but she imagines that this is the kind of investment that parents must feel.

Which would make Eduarda the other mom who's abandoning her to take care of a baby website all by herself, single parent style, all summer. Or something.

She looks down at Eduarda, sleeping in her lap, and thinks about her soft-spoken, unassuming politeness, her old-school traditionalism, the advertisements. She looks up again at the emailed lease document and thinks of Sean, his advice, that exciting meeting; thinks about the brash, irreverent way he presented himself, his fuck-'em-all confidence.

 _Looks great,_ she emails the landlord back. _We'll take it._


	3. Chapter 3

 

_ she was wincing like something brittle trying hard to bend _  
_ she was numb with the terror of losing her best friend _  
_ but we never see things changing, we only see them ending _  
_ and some vicious whispering voice kept saying: you have no choice _

**Eduarda**

Way back around spring break, maybe even back before he'd set up their meeting with Sean (and what a great idea _that_ had turned out to be), Christian Lee asked Eduarda out, and Eduarda had turned him politely down. When he asks again – over Facebook message, no joke – it's almost finals already and Eduarda is caught up in the panic of that, and Mark's been nowhere to be found for days and days, MIA from all her classes and bullshitting or cheating her way through finals, too busy orchestrating Facebook's impending move to have time for anything else anymore. Including, apparently, Eduarda.

So when Christian asks again, this time on the spur of the moment Eduarda says yes. It's not like she's even out to get laid or anything – it's just that for one damn night she wants to get away from it all, just wants to get dressed up and have doors opened and chairs pulled out for her, to be appreciated for putting in the effort to look pretty instead of having to laugh off disparaging comments like _how can you even walk in those ridiculous shoes,_ to get tipsy and have some nice normal conversation that isn't about the logistics of server space and optimal temperatures for safe storage of computer hardware and what high-end electrical equipment's best to invest in if you don't want to blow all of the fuses out in your average suburban house.

That's all she wants, just a second away from all of it, and she tells herself that it's okay – it's just a first date, and anyway it's not like she and Mark made any promises to each other. College friends-with-benefits call it quits for the summer all the time, right?

She's already gotten done up for her night out - little black dress, sky-high heels and pearls – when she realizes that she left her best handbag in the triple the other week. Fuck. Eduarda glances at the clock. If she hurries, she can still make it over there and back before Christian comes by to pick her up.

She dashes over to Kirkland, heels and all, hoping that someone's home to let her in; fortunately, Dustin is there. When he sees her he gives a good-natured wolf whistle, asks what she's all dressed up for.

Eduarda tells him, and watches the smile slide right off his face.

"Um," he says, looking uncharacteristically distressed. "That's cool. Here's your purse thing, so I guess you can go ahead with your date or whatever now –"

Mark appears in the open doorway of her room, and something about the set of her jaw, her shoulders, makes it perfectly clear that she'd overheard.

"Warda," she says, coolly, and her eyes sweep over Eduarda's body, up and down.

"Mark." She doesn't know what else to say. Her pretty clothes feel too tight, all of a sudden, and underneath them she feels this hot itch of guilt for absolutely no good reason. "How's – is everything going ahead okay with the move and stuff?"

Dustin's still right there, watching, and he doesn't say anything but he looks kind of tight around the eyes.

"It's – going," Mark says slowly. She's holding a clicky pen in one hand, and her thumb keeps pushing it in and out, automatic, too-fast and compulsive. "Haven't seen you around for a bit."

Eduarda hitches the black bag up over her shoulder. "Yeah. I – finals, you know."

Mark says, "Finals, right. I haven't even been _thinking_ about them, so much is going on right now," and she chuckles, but it sounds forced, which is bizarre and jarring since it's _Mark;_ Mark never fakes things like that for the sake of politeness or social convention, and she isn't very convincing now.

At this point Dustin appears to remember the existence of a thing called tact, and he hurriedly excuses himself to his own room. It doesn't really help the awkwardness level any.

"Anyway, I, um." _You never made anything official,_ Eduarda reminds herself, and _If she really gave a fuck, she'd say something about it. When have you ever known Mark to hold her tongue about anything she wanted?_ "I better get going - I'm running late for," and she trails off.

Mark's chin comes up and she says stiffly, "Enjoy your date," and then she turns around and retreats into her bedroom, the door closing behind her.

Eduarda does not, in fact, enjoy her date, stomach too cramped up to eat much of anything, unable to relax even after copious amounts of wine. But afterwards, Christian still asks if he can see her again; and she is still not good at ever saying no.

 

**Mark**

Everyone in the Palo Alto house operates on a deeply whacked-out sleep schedule, and Mark's the worst out of all of them. She's rarely up before noon, so it's not weird that she's still up right now even though it's nearly four in the morning and the rest of the house is dark and silent. She had another tense phone conversation today with Warda – Warda, who's far away in NYC, trying fruitlessly to court advertisers - so it's not weird that Mark can't sleep, and it's not weird that she got drunk on her own, trying to take her mind off it for just a little while.

She's still pretty blitzed when she logs on and composes a scathing blog post about _that girl,_ the kind who will make out with other girls at parties for the general edification of all present, who's fine doing the experimental fooling-around thing at college but straightens right back out in a hurry around graduation: the so-called four-year queer. Glaring at the screen, Mark writes about having no time, none at all, for people who live their lives with insufficient honesty, and admittedly none of it's very conducive to taking her mind off of anything, but she does it anyway. No names are named, at least, she's learned that much.

After it's all typed up, though, she stares at the window full of text for a bit and then deletes it without posting, and then logs out of her blog for the first time in god knows how long. It's just not as satisfying an outlet as it used to be. She tabs over to Facebook instead, meaning to lose herself in work, only she ends up pulling up Warda's page. Which is an even less good idea, but she's drunk and who cares.

Her eyes track over the neat blue-and-white boxes, noting that Warda hasn't changed her status from _Single_ to _In A Relationship_ , which makes Mark curl her lip up gleefully despite herself. She has changed her profile picture though. It's not the silly casual one of her and Mark anymore, it's back to the Investors Association one with the power suit and posed smile.

She clicks over to the shiny new feature they launched just a couple of weeks ago, the one where your friends can 'tag' you in pictures they upload themselves. There are a couple of pictures of Warda with that guy, and Mark's lip curls the other way this time. And there's – christ, apparently someone they knew had thought to bring their digital camera to that stupid Caribbean Night back last winter, because there's Warda in her stupid coconut bikini top, half naked and laughing, and – god, already now it feels so long ago, far away, that chilly night.

She should close the window but she doesn't, she keeps the pictures up, gazing at them and telling herself that that's not weird either because hey, her best friend is photogenic as hell and anyway they have a...history there, it's not like Mark hasn't seen a whole lot more of her in the flesh –

She thinks back on their long-distance talk earlier today, how she'd found herself avoiding any mention of Sean's name, any hint that he was back in the picture, all the while not knowing why exactly she was doing it. No, that's not true, she knows why. Back at that boozy dinner meeting at 66, Warda and Sean had failed to hit it off in a manner so blatantly obvious that even someone like Mark couldn't help but notice. It was like Warda was _jealous_ – which was and is ridiculous, right, since Mark isn't even into guys that way. If anybody has a right to be jealous here it's her, what with that fucking Christian kid. She's not though. Jealous, that is.

What she is is _drunk,_ and that's why she pulls open the drawer of her computer desk and pulls out her bullet vibrator, opens her bare legs and gets herself off right there in her computer chair with her eyes on the pictures. Warda's slim golden legs and shoulders and stomach look delicious on film, but as Mark squirms and heaves her hips up desperately what she's mostly looking at is the expression on picture-Warda's face: one hundred percent young dumb uncomplicated happiness. Mark hasn't seen that look in a while now.

She locks her teeth and stabs up viciously into herself, gazing at Warda's wide grin and the lei draped over her breasts (she's sucked hickeys there, around the nipples and in the shadow of her cleavage) and torturing herself wondering if maybe she's getting it on with Christian like right now, ramming the vibe deeper as she pictures it, deep enough to hurt. What time even is it on the East Coast? He's probably tiny-dicked like all Asian guys, anyway. She lets her wrist press up hard against her clit and shoves the thing in over and over again, fast and raw, biting the side of her closed fist to keep from crying out and waking up the guys when she comes.

After, though, she feels even worse, drunk-sick and pathetic as she X's out of the browser and wonders if anyone else has ever stooped so low as to masturbate to Facebook. Mark suspects that the answer is yes, and for a second she feels slimy for ever having made the damn thing in the first place, like she’s given birth to a monster.

That night she writes in a brand new relationship status option, _It's Complicated,_ and a couple thousand college kids coast to coast are already using it by the time she finally hits the sack at seven-thirty in the morning.

 

**Eduarda**

She stands on the front porch of the rented house, hair plastered down flat to her head and makeup probably running down her cheeks by now, and she's just thinking that it's not possible for her to be any _more_ pissed off right now when Sean fucking Parker opens the door and proves her wrong about that. When he looks her drowned-rat self up and down and raises an amused eyebrow, she wants to punch him, and when she gets inside and the stoned-out ditzes on the couch glance over at her and stifle giggles –

She's so drenched and tired and jetlagged and angry that even Mark's obvious pleasure in seeing her is cold fucking comfort, especially when accompanied with a clumsy smack to the hip (with her Twizzler hand no less), a total lack of anything resembling an apology for stranding Eduarda at the airport, and an immediate launch into babbling about something called the wall. Eduarda will show her _face_ the fucking wall if she doesn't get an explanation and a hot shower extremely fucking soon.

In the hallway Mark asks her, "How's the internship?" and wow, Eduarda remembers finding Mark's people-ineptitude almost cute, once upon a time, in its own obtuse way. It's not nearly so charming now.

She stares disbelievingly at Mark. "I _quit_. I _told_ you this. I quit on the _spot_ the very first day, when the guy who would've been my boss's boss hit on me like _first thing._ "

Mark's eyebrows go up. "You quit over that, seriously?"

"What, I was supposed to lie back and get _harassed_ all summer?"

"Don't be stupid, obviously that's not what I'm saying. It's just that I'm a little surprised you haven't realized by now that that's how someone who looks like you is going to get treated," Mark says, and there's not a trace of irony in her tone.

"You're. Are you _blaming_ me?"

"I'm just pointing out facts."

Eduarda stares at her, furious, but Mark's already moved obliviously on to "How's Christian?" like she's aiming randomly at a safe-topics-of-conversation dartboard.

How's Christian, indeed. Eduarda thinks about how right before she left to fly out here he'd told her: "You really expect me to believe that all those Silicon Valley nerdboys can keep their hands off a girl who looks like you?" She thinks about his irrational jealousy, his possessive rages; and she wants to confide in Mark, as if they were the kind of girlfriends who have sleepovers and tell secrets and paint each others' toenails. But that's never been them anyway, and after the shit Mark just said to her –

"He's a mooch," she says shortly. "He sits on my couch and plays video games all day. I'm pretty sure he only wants me as his sugar mama," all of which is also true, but doesn't help her sound like any less of an asshole-magnet pushover here.

"It's nice that you have a boyfriend though," Mark says levelly, and she eyes Eduarda across the narrow corridor, her face unreadable.

Trying to call her out on the Sean thing goes about equally well, which is to say not well at all. Mark won't listen, refuses to hear her out, and Eduarda would explode with, _He's such a fucking skeeze, what do you even SEE in him?_ if she didn't think it'd make her sound – well, like Christian, pretty much. Which is fucked up to say the least, but Mark is seriously so defensive and frustrated that Eduarda actually does wonder for a second whether she might have some sort of _thing_ for Sean. She dismisses the idea pretty much immediately though. Mark is like a Kinsey _9_ – that doesn't even exist, but if it did, Mark would be it – and even if she weren't, she's basically the polar opposite of Sean's taste in ladies, if the bimbos in the living room are any indication.

Reaching that conclusion doesn't make Eduarda feel any better though. In fact, something about it freaks her out maybe even worse than it would if it actually _were_ a sex thing.

"- Please don't tell him I said that," Mark's blurting out, tight-faced, and all the _I need you_ 's in the world can't make Eduarda shake the feeling that Mark's choosing him over her.

She can't get a flight back to New York any sooner than tomorrow night, which leaves her stuck in Palo Alto for the next twenty-four hours, fuck. Eduarda seriously considers getting a hotel room, because the last thing she wants is to be around Sean (and she's not feeling so great about Mark right now either), but these cross-coastal plane trips are already kind of breaking the bank, so in the end she crashes in the spare room that night. It's a wreck like the rest of the place, littered with evidence of the partying that everyone's apparently been doing out here. On Eduarda's dime, thank you very much. She has a lot of trouble getting to sleep.

The next day she wakes late to find the house in a state of chaos – everyone except Sean are running around looking stressed out, and Dustin says something about overtaxed servers. It's nothing Eduarda can help with, and she has time to kill before heading back to the airport, so she goes to lay out by the pool in her bikini, soaking up some rays while she tries to think.

It's going to be time for her to make some hard decisions, that much is clear, and Eduarda _hates_ having to do that kind of thing (and worries a lot that that says something about her, that she doesn't have the backbone to really succeed in business, like Pai used to say about women being fundamentally unsuited for the world of finance). She's already had to turn her phone off because Christian keeps blowing it up - she has to get rid of him, this is getting ridiculous - and as for the company, the money, _Mark_...

" _There_ you are," Mark says, pausing by the sliding glass patio door. She's barefoot, wearing a sports bra and cutoffs. Eduarda sees that she still doesn't bother to shave her legs or pits.

"Server crisis over?" she says, and Mark jerks her head in a curt nod. "Great. Did you need me for something?"

"No, just wondering if you'd left already," Mark answers coldly, and she splashes down into the pool without another word.

Eduarda slides her sunglasses off and cranes her neck over to look. Mark is just lying there, floating on her back, staring blankly up at the pale, perfect California sky. She doesn't look back at Eduarda.

Eduarda has no precedent for handling this new and awful distance between them, and her instincts, long geared towards Mark like the proverbial moth to the flame, take over and try to close it in the most literal way possible: she gets up from the patio chair, pads over to the deep end and swan-dives into the deliciously cool water, far enough away that she won't splash Mark's floating body. Then she swims in slow strokes over to Mark, meaning to – take another shot at talking it out, instead of talking past each other?

But Mark flips upright in the water and reaches for her instead, kisses her and wraps her legs around her underwater, and Eduarda gets kind of distracted from whatever her original goal might have been.

Mark tastes like chlorine and her fingertips skid where they press into the wet skin of Eduarda's elbows, and the sun beating down on the water dazzles Eduarda's eyes even through their closed lids. She could almost laugh when she thinks about Christian, his suspicions and how she's totally justifying them after all, if hardly in the way he'd thought. If she's planning to break it off with him anyway, though, that makes it – not as much of a big deal, right? It's a pretty weak rationalization, but Mark's nipples are stiff and they keep rubbing up against her own through thin wet stretch fabric, and Eduarda can only bring herself to feel bad over how she _doesn't_ feel bad.

They make out in the pool until Mark starts to sunburn - Eduarda can see it through her half-shut eyes every time she grips Mark's shoulders, angry pink skin going momentarily dead white - and then they stumble back into the cool of the house. Mark cocks her head and Eduarda can tell that she's doing a quick scan, eyes and ears, checking first to make sure Sean isn't home. It makes her sick to her stomach, almost too sick to want this no matter how much she might _want_ it.

But the place is deserted except for Eric, napping, and Ian, wired in, and so Mark takes them to her bedroom and puts that sharp tongue to better use between Eduarda's thighs. She breaks her down so methodically it's almost cruel, gets her off and then raises her head and smirks up at her in a way that's far from sweet or playful, her face all sticky, her mouth and chin gleaming with it. Eduarda looks back at her, and then she rolls them over and scissors their legs together, rubbing dirty-wet against each other while Eduarda pinches and twists Mark's nipples between thumb and forefinger, gives Mark the fingers of her other hand to suck on.

It says something, that this is the only time this whole trip that Eduarda's felt like she had anywhere near Mark's full attention. Back at school Mark was often distracted or dismissive, but Eduarda was still used to having _more_ of her attention than anyone else got. Now Sean and the others have a piece of that pie, and Facebook itself has most of it, and even here in the depths of this bed Eduarda can't help feeling the gravity of the change.

 _Let me in,_ she thinks blindly, letting Mark's hips rock between her splayed fingers, two in her cunt and one in her ass, _let me in let me in,_ until Mark shudders and comes.

Mark falls asleep, after, and Eduarda doesn't wake her before she heads to the airport in the dark.

 

**Mark**

"They're scared of me, baby," Sean croons into her ear. "And they're gonna be scared of you," and maybe it's just the drinking or the hot girls or the VIP section (not only can Sean get her into clubs for which she'd never be pretty and polished enough otherwise; no, he can also drop a word and a wink and smooth their way into the damn _VIP_ ), but it's the sweetest shit Mark's ever heard.

'Baby' notwithstanding, it's not – they're not – like _that_. It's why she pays less than no attention to Warda's obvious jealousy, palpable even across the span of a continent: it's ridiculous, plain and simple, totally misplaced. Mark's never been into guys (Warda of all people should know that much) and she's not looking to start now. Yeah, admittedly, the first time Sean took her out alone she kept her eyes peeled for untoward gestures, ready to drop him like a hot potato – big ideas or not – if he tried anything. But he didn't, he treated her just like he would a guy, talked to her as if she were a whole different species from his constant parade of giggling, simpering 'friends'. With them, he's flirtatious and sexual but casually dismissive; with her, he's all business, focused to the point of manic. And as far as Mark's concerned, that's just as it should be.

Back at Harvard, especially back in her sausagefest of a program, guys used to take her measurably less seriously in direct proportion to how obvious it was on any given day that she was, in fact, female. Mark still vividly remembers a couple of times when it was laundry day and her usual drapey, oversized hoodies were in the wash, so she ran down to the labs in an old t-shirt from junior high computer camp that now stretched too-small across her tits, or a pair of shorts she'd managed to shrink in the overzealous industrial dorm dryers – and then watched in dismay as her fellow students, guys she had classes with, altered their demeanor towards her in a thousand little ways that they didn't even seem to be aware of: tiny insidious things, like trying to overexplain concepts to her when she was ten times the programmer they were, until Mark thought that she would have almost preferred outright ogling. After it happened a few times she realized what the active variable must be; after that, she did laundry more often.

Sean isn't like that. When she's with him Mark finally doesn't feel like she has to prove herself extra hard, be even sharper and better than she is, just because she's the token girl. Being with Warda was a little bit like that too, sort of, but Warda is sweet and uncynical, more easily impressed; Sean is older, cooler, a _guy_ , and his approval feels like it counts for more, somehow. And when he tells her stories of wounded pride and sweet revenge, _fuck the suits_ and _we'll do it on OUR terms,_ it's like someone finally has the balls to say out loud everything that Mark's been thinking inside herself for so long.

"This is _our_ time, baby, _your_ time," he tells her, bending his face in close to hers over the table - and it's not that she gets off on anything about Sean himself, never that, only on the things he promises her: takes her up to the tops of San Francisco hotspots and high-rises, shows her everything laid out before them and says with every word, every look, _you can have all of this, it can all be yours, if you just come with me and leave everybody else behind._

 

**Eduarda**

By the time the plane touches back down at JFK, Eduarda has decided.

It's clear enough that Sean's got Mark's ear now, can pour whatever poison he pleases into it, because he's there all the time and Eduarda - isn't. It's still hard for her to believe that someone as smart as Mark can't see through this guy, this weird naïve blind spot she's got going on. But there it is; and with angel investors entering the picture, Mark likely won't require further seed money (partying money, more like) from the Eduarda Saverin Foundation. It's probably pretty sick and sad that Eduarda's not even mad about feeling used and discarded half as much as she is about the fact that Mark doesn't even _need_ to use her, anymore.

She has to get Mark's attention back somehow, and apparently being the person Mark has _sex_ with isn't cutting it, so it's time for drastic measures.

 _I used to be such a nice girl,_ she thinks as she slaps the bankbook down, _such a sweet kind girl, before Mark Zuckerberg got her hands on me._

She goes back to her shitty sublet and takes a nap, even though she isn't tired, just to stop thinking about the whole mess for a few hours; and when Christian storms in, already shouting about how she hasn't returned his texts or calls, she tells him she's breaking up with him.

He responds by trying to set fire to her apartment.

When Eduarda fields Mark's frantic, furious calls about the account, she's doing it all alone out in the muggy New York summer streets, subway rides back and forth as she searches for a new place, tries to figure out if her renters insurance will cover the fire damage, changes her phone number and looks into restraining orders. If she really wanted, Pai probably knows someone with shady enough connections to hire someone else to go and scare off a troublesome ex-boyfriend, maybe fuck him up a little in the process - but first she'd have to tell Pai everything and he would be disgusted, see her as weak, call her a bad judge of character to get involved with a guy like that in the first place. Eduarda's too tired and heartsick to hear any of it, so in the end she doesn't bother.

Nor does she tell Mark.

"Warda, we did it," Mark's saying, voice gone oddly soft over the line; and even now, even after everything, that's all it takes for Eduarda to follow orders and get her ass back on the next flight to San Francisco.

The last week has been emotional whiplash of the worst kind: Christian and the fire and the fallout from that, the good news of Thiel's investment, the long flights back and forth, visiting Mark and fighting with her and fucking her and leaving and provoking her and fighting _again_ and making up and coming back. Eduarda's pretty shattered by this point, honestly - so if she doesn't read the reincorporation papers are closely as she could have, skims over some of the boilerplate fine print, who could blame her? It's just a formality, just a little official reshuffling.

Mark won't be back at school this fall ("for at least a semester," she repeats, and Eduarda knows that she'll be finishing out her last year on her own) so once the documents are all in order, it's goodbye for a while. Eduarda hasn't even told her that things are over with Christian, but Mark surprises her by kissing her goodbye anyway: a deliberate, lingering press of lips, almost gentle in a way that Mark rarely is.

"You've gotta come back," she says, and Eduarda says, "Yeah, I'll be here."

When she walks into Facebook headquarters four months later, on the night of the million-member party, it's with her hands and her eyes and her heart wide open for the very last time.

 

**Mark**

"You _bitch,"_ Eduarda nearly screams, and her dark eyes are full of tears. "You backstabbing Judas BITCH," and Mark can only stare dumbly up at her and think that she herself must actually be the sociopath that people increasingly seem to think she is, because as Eduarda stands there shouting at her all Mark can think of is how fucking _good_ she looks, long and slimline in her sharp-shouldered all-black, throat held tense in the low open V at her neck, wet eyes flashing and red lipstick like a battle flag. It's like the universe is doing its level best to remind Mark good and goddamn well of exactly what she's losing here.

"You set me up, I can't believe you set me up." Eduarda's voice is swerving all over the place, uneven, soaring up to a shout and sinking back down again to nearly nothing. "I thought – it was going to be _us,"_ voice turning inward as if she's half talking to herself now, "we were going to do this _together,"_ and Mark wants to spring to her feet and yell, _Together? Maybe if your idea of together is an entire country apart. Us? Maybe if your idea of us is using me to experiment and then running back to dick for your REAL dating._ But it's no good - her tongue is as frozen as the rest of her and all she can do is sit there, transfixed in place by Eduarda's anguished eyes.

It's the same kind of paralysis as in an accident or nightmare, the way time seems to slow down around something terrible as it unfolds right in front of her. Sean is speaking for her, now, loud and harsh and Mark's throat is choked, her limbs leaden; she doesn't think she could physically move from her chair right now if someone paid her. There's a buzzing in her ears, a rushing in her head, and she has the fierce irrational urge to put her headphones back on, plug into a computer that isn't lying in pieces around her feet, and run away and hide amidst the code like she always does.

"How long were you _planning_ this?" Eduarda's practically whispering. "Mark, were you – when we - how –"

The Sean-summoned security detail has already materialized, two men so absurdly big and beefy in comparison to Eduarda's willowy frame that it's laughable. They hang back, though, uncertainty visible beneath their masks of blank professionalism, like they're not about to step in and haul any well-dressed young ladies out of here kicking and screaming until and unless it's on Mark's direct say-so. And Mark's not about to give anyone any orders any time soon, because right now her brain's stuck on a hellish infinite loop, the kind that can bring whole programs shuddering to a standstill: _how did it come to this, how –_

Distantly she registers the sound of Sean's voice again, and it's saying vicious, sneering things: _Did you really think we were going to let a bougie little trust-fund baby like you strut her overdressed ass around pretending she ran the company?_ As he tells her that her name's off the masthead his eyes are too bright, cruel, _enjoying_ it, and Eduarda's face is crumpling like the balled-up papers she's clutching in one fist, the contracts that spell out her elimination. Mark used to like that so much about her, the way Eduarda wore all of her emotions right there on the outside. Now it's the most terrible thing she's ever seen.

Eduarda turns away from Sean like she refuses to hear any more from him; looks back straight at Mark. _"Mark,"_ she says again, and the hurt break and catch in her voice is horribly similar to the one Mark remembers from bed, god, _sociopath._

She finds her voice, finally. _You could still save it,_ her heart's whispering, _change it, still, maybe,_ but what comes out is: "You're gonna blame me because it turned out you weren't up for playing with the big boys after all?" and the horror of it is that she can't even tell if it's just more of Sean's words spilling out of her mouth or whether it's her, this time; whether she herself was always capable of this, all along.

Eduarda's mouth opens, closes, her face working like every last little muscle is in pain. She looks Mark straight in the eyes and says, bitter agony, "Tell me this isn't about -"

But that's apparently where words fail her, too, so that for an awful moment they just stare mutely at each other, Sean's eyes flicking back and forth between the two of them, confused and speculative. You could hear a pin drop in the bullpen right now. Mark's employees aren't even pretending not to gape, the lot of them.

She has the wholly irrelevant thought that if she could graph out the last year (god, can it really have been only a year since it started, since the algorithm on the Kirkland window?) it would be a perfect inverse relationship: Facebook exploding vs. the two of them imploding, exponential curves that follow the same graceful swooping arc of a laptop caught up, flung down. Mark knows (is pretty sure) that it's not like she sold her soul to Satan for Facebook's success and put Eduarda up as the sacrificial lamb, it was more complicated than that, it was - but in front of her the cost is written all over Eduarda's face, and right now Mark can't remember why this price is one she ever thought she could afford to pay.

When Eduarda finally breaks the silence it's to tell Mark she better lawyer up, and when she says _I'm coming back for EVERYTHING_ it sounds like a vow, like all the promises they should have made to each other and didn't.

Mark sits there in a ring of broken computer parts like a way too obvious metaphor for all of this, and thinks with perfect clarity, _huh, she's actually going to sue me,_ and it's the same mute surprise she'd felt when Eduarda first marched in here and confronted her in one violent explosion of words and motion. She doesn't know what she'd expected to happen, exactly, but it hadn't been that. Back – before, Eduarda never used to call Mark on _anything._ She wasn't the same kind of person as Mark was, hadn't built up a protective layer of asshole: and that open, trusting nature was exactly why she got sold down the river like this in the first place.

Mark tries to tell herself one last time, _anyone that gullible deserves it, really._

Even inside her skull it rings hollow.

Sean's handing Eduarda something - a check – and telling her it's drawn on the frozen account, and Mark hadn't known he was going to do that, to rub Eduarda's face in it like that for no reason but to humiliate her further. Eduarda stares at it, and stares at him, and then she takes another couple of steps in, heels a sharp tap against the floor, looming over Mark, and Mark looks up at her like an animal in the headlights.

Sean says, smirking, "Catfight?" and Eduarda rounds on him, hauls back and double-slaps his face so hard that his head snaps back: _crack, crack._ He backs away, white shocked face marred with bloodlike stains on both cheeks; security moves in immediately, but Mark turns her stare onto them, and whatever is on her face makes them back off, too.

The cracked laptop screen's still lying at her feet, dead and black, and in its blank dark reflection she can almost see things, visions, the kind of flash-before-your-eyes slideshow you're supposed to get directly prior to dying, only it's not her life, it's _them,_ the them-that-was: Eduarda brushing snowflakes off the shoulders of her big black winter overcoat, Eduarda's stupid heels that made her too tall for Mark to kiss without going up on tiptoes first, Eduarda fluttering her long dark lashes and cooing "Math is _hard_ " in a sarcastic Barbie voice over her econ homework. Her late-night rants in the privacy of Mark's room on the subject of guys in business ( _you wouldn’t believe them, Zuckerberg, these ASSHOLES_ ) and Mark retorting that that was nothing, she ought to see _computer_ guys. The messages she'd leave on their door whiteboard, headed _E.S._ like Mark wouldn't recognize her sloppy scrawl otherwise. The rainy night she locked them both into Mark's Kirkland bedroom and slowly _slowly_ slid her whole slicked fist into Mark's body until Mark was thrashing and swearing and biting down on her lips in vain to keep from making so much noise that the boys would hear her.

Eduarda bends down beside her, and Mark flinches. But Eduarda doesn't lay a finger on her, just leans in and hisses, very low, for Mark's ears alone: "You stupid cunt, you have no idea, the way I felt about you. You have _no idea."_

She straightens up again, tall and magnificent in a terrible ruined way, and then she's walking out of there, far out in front of the security escort, long-legged stride strong and purposeful: like she knows exactly where she's headed, and where she's headed is anywhere away from Mark.

 

>   
>  **Mark**
> 
> Mark has never really had girl friends. All through middle and high school the only friends she ever made were geeky computer guys, and here at college she doesn't expect that to change, especially since she's planning on a CS concentration and she knows the demographics of these things. (This guy she met in the lab during Freshman Week, a friendly kid named Chris, had told her over lunch in the d-hall: "My buddy over at MIT says that in his department, when there's a girl, she can go out with a different boy every night of the week if she wants to."
> 
> "If she's conventionally attractive," Mark retorted. "Anyway, too bad I'm not _into_ boys."
> 
> "I'll take 'em if you don't want 'em," Chris said, and winked.)
> 
> Despite – or maybe due to – the fact that she's into girls instead, as a rule Mark doesn’t tend to get along well with them. She especially doesn't tend to get along well with girls like this one (Electra? Edwina? fuck). Which is why it's so unexpected that Depressingly Gorgeous seems actually nice, easy to talk to, interested in what Mark is saying. She's got this easy charm to her, the kind that Mark couldn't develop if she worked at it for the rest of her life - if she even wanted to in the first place, which she assuredly doesn't, but this girl wears it well.
> 
> Mark feels the faintest twinge of remorse for prejudging her intelligence. If you ask her, it’s still totally safe to assume that hot chicks are dumb bitches, usually, but possibly this one is an exception. Granted she and Mark probably have nothing in common, since she's clearly into all of that girly crap that Mark wants no part of, and Mark can't imagine what they'd even talk about besides class stuff.
> 
> Still, though.
> 
> She finishes explaining about the forums she'd loved and imprinted on, the guys and the userhandle thing and how she'd ended up just switching her actual name over wholesale, and the girl eyes her, considering, before nodding again.
> 
> "I think it's cute," she says, face breaking into a smile, and Mark is genuinely surprised to feel one corner of her own mouth tugging itself up in response. "Suits you."
> 
> "Saverin, Eduarda," calls out their professor, kind of sharply.
> 
> When Depressingly Gorgeous raises one manicured hand he gives the pair of them the sideeye, all _Silence in the ranks,_ and they both shut up, then; but after a minute the girl – _Eduarda_ – slants a conspirator's embarrassed grin at Mark.
> 
> _Oops,_ she mouths, exaggerated and silent, and just like that, Mark’s made her first and best friend at college.


End file.
